[Rd] attachments on R mailing lists

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Toews <mwtoews at sfu.ca>
>>>>>     on Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:00:03 -0700 writes:

    Michael> Okay ... I'll try to attach that patch once more
    Michael> ... (does this list only accept certain exertions
    Michael> for attachments? I used '.patch', but it must have
    Michael> been filtered off, so I'll try '.patch.txt' now

It's not the file name, but the MIME type of an attachment which
is important.
  text/plain  is valid, e.g.,

The posting guide and even http://www.r-project.org/mail.html
mention this.

It seems your e-mail software does not allow to specify the MIME
type used, but rather determines it from the file extension.
Other e-mail client programs send all "unknown" attachments" as
binary; and most ascii texts seem "unknown" in this regard.

All this feels Micro$oftish and it is sad to see that such a 
softie--attitude also invades free software developments such as a
unix-based version Thunderbird which I'm guessing you use.

Regards,
Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
(R mailing list manager)