Bo Peng wrote:
The moral of this story is
that it is not safe to send a lyx file in an email without zipping or
tarring it.
This is a serious problem! Since dot after *every inset* will be put
in a single line, this problem will be prominent for lyx, and lyx will
be blamed if this happens to normal users. I know this is unfair, but
I am quite surprised to know that the problem is caused by our trusty
mail server/client.
Since we can not change the behavior of sendmail, can we do something
to lyx format? It should be easy to add comments to every such lines.
I am not familiar with lyx format but I guess this will not cause
compatibility problem.
Should I submit a bug? I would rate it as critical.
Please submit bug reports - to the makers of bad email clients.
I tried sending with thunderbird 1.0.7 and receiving with mutt - no problem.
The file was automatically encoded with base64, so no problems with dots.
The workaround for users is simple - compress the file.
Email client makers have two choices:
* Don't mess up the dots
* Encode files that won't work well as-is. Wether they are binary files
full of gunk, or lyx documents with the occational single-line dot. They
already do this for many other kinds of files. Try sending a binary file.
Or try sending a mbox file as an attachment. It will get stored in the
recipient's mailbox without confusion even though it seemingly contains
lots of messages. This because it gets encoded. Send a text file
containing
examples of all the SMTP commands. Again, it will work without confusing
the email servers. Surely they can do this for lyx documents too, which
are text files containing the occational dot.
An email client that add dots to dots (and removes the extras upon
reception) may also show the opposite problem - removal of doubled dots
that was supposed to be there. Rare, because you don't use double dots
much in text. But you never know what a binary file might contain.
Helge Hafting
