[plug] Blank messages

[Brian Parish]

Gavin Chester wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-07-23 at 17:47 +0800, Steve Boak wrote:
>   
>> On Sunday 23 July 2006 13:22, skribe wrote:
>>     
>>> Hey folks:
>>>
>>> A friend of mine is having problems reading some of my emails.  He uses
>>> both Outlook and Outlook Express (on different machines).  I use kmail.  He
>>> can read with Express but not with Outlook.  Outlook shows my messages to
>>> be blank.  Is there a setting either of us can use to remedy the problem?
>>> Unfortunately he has to use Outlook at work.
>>>
>>>       
>> I remember having a similar problem a few months ago with kmail, and after a 
>> lot of digging around for information, it turned out to be kmail chose the 
>> wrong character encoding when replying to certain messages, and then Outlook 
>> completely ignored the contents.
>>
>> I think it was in [settings] [appearance] [message window tab] "fallback 
>> character encoding" being set to some weird character set. And it 
>> just 'happened', I don't think I changed anything to cause it. Mind you, I 
>> could be wrong about that :-)
>>
>> If your friend can (in Outlook) change the properties/character encoding of 
>> the messages you sent, he should be able to read them.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>     
>>> skribe
>>>       
>
> I also saw this problem a few years back when I was using LookOut as my
> main mail client (shudder).  It wasn't just kmail, it seemed to affect a
> lot of list mail that I was getting.  For me, the only way to see the
> message was to click on 'reply' or 'forward' and then read the quoted
> text.  Was really weird, and only seemed to happen for a while and jsut
> seemed to go away, AFAIK.  Maybe add that suggestion to your list of
> things for your friend to try :-)
>
> Gavin
>
>   
This is a known Lookout bug - or nature's way of telling you to wise up
and use a decent mail client.

IIRC it was to do with kmail creating a message with an absolutely valid
MIME type, which lookout chooses to interpret as "ignore the
following".  A bit of googling will turn it up.  I only ever had it
happen on messages created in Outlook that I replied to.  If your friend
tells Outlook to send in plain text, the problem will go away of course,
but his pretty HTML formating will also go of course.

M$ acknowledge the bug somewhere in their knowledge base.  The solution
they provide is to avoid the problem by not using that construct.  Great
help!

cheers
Brian