Hi.

I have sent out payment details for orders up to number 25. There have been a few bounces, with the error "500 Host server does not support 8bitmime". This seems to be related to the encoding of currency symbols for some reason. If anyone has an idea of what the problem is and how to correct it, please let me know.

I have remailed the bounced emails manually, with the currency symbol removed. So far, these have been for order numbers 9, 12, and 20. If you have an order number up to 25 and haven't received a payment request by tomorrow, contact me at the address on the original order confirmation.

pca

Hi Patrick,

I'm in position 82 (I think, thereabouts), I'm wondering how long it's going to be before you make other batches? I'm not saying this because I'm desperately in a hurry, but because when you are ready to ship you are going to email. I live in the UK so i'll pay by check, the only thing is that I'm going on holiday to australia soon until the middle of april (If there not going to be ready until after then - there's no problem!), it's unlikely that I'll have access to my email - I don't want to get back and find emails from you asking for payment, and then me losing my queue position/tuner because I wasn't in the country? If needs be, I have no problem sending you a cheque beforehand?

Thanks.

Adrian

Patrick, number 12 is me :-)

My ISP's mail server was out for 24 hours until yesterday and also went again last night. Sounds like its having problems again.

If you have control of your mail server, then you should be able to tweak some options to get it to convert 8-bit messages or send them anyway, but what to do depends on the mail server.

If you do not (and this may be a better idea anyway), you should be able to change your mail client to use quoted-printable for email messages. This will convert non-ASCII characters to an ASCII sequence so that no 8-bit characters are sent. Again, how to do that depends on your mail client, but you should be able to find it in some preferences somewhere.

It's the ISP's server. My ISP is only the biggest phone company in the country and yesterday all there users had no email! (Actually we could send but not receive). I would imagine that the problems are related to that.

#9 was me, I have replied to the original email with the order number and gave you two more email addresses you could try.

If your mail client supports quoted printable you may be able force 7 bit ascii up front. 8bitmime is an optional feature of ESTMP, and if your end isn't allowing the other end to say no, or worse isn't asking, that might happen.

I suppose the other thing you could do is tell someone whose mail server supports 8->7 your hostname and relay...

There have been a few bounces, with the error "500 Host server does not support 8bitmime". This seems to be related to the encoding of currency symbols for some reason. If anyone has an idea of what the problem is and how to correct it, please let me know.

Ah yes, a classic.

Normally caused by an MS Exchange Server hiding behind an IIS box running the SMTP relay that comes with Windows.

Some versions of Exchange do not support 8bitmime. The IIS SMTP relay does support 8bitmime.

A client that supports 8bitmime connects to the IIS box via SMTP, the IIS box advertises that it supports 8bitmime so the client uses it and the IIS box accepts it. The IIS box then relays the message to the Exchange box via SMTP and tries to use 8bitmime. The Exchange server says "I can't handle 8bitmime" and the message gets bounced.

So, you either need to stop your "client" (in this case probably your SMTP server) trying to use 8bitmime, or more properly get the remote server fixed.

Fortunately fixing the remote server is easy (for the admin at least) by disabling 8bitmime on the IIS relay:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q262168

pca:

Just a note to let you know:
I downloaded the .pdf manual, to get a taste of what fun challenge I'm up against, and noticed something. In Adobe Acrobat, the entire thing was infested with little "mac" squares:



Not a huge deal, but I kept loosing my place reading.

(Number: 64!)

I don't get that when I open the manual. Perhaps it's something specific to your system?

Hmmm. It looks like your viewer is confused by the space character, as if the font it is using doesn't have that character in its table. What application are you using to view the pdf and on which platform and OS? Assuming that you're using the Adobe Acrobat reader, the output of File -> Document Properties -> Fonts might be interesting.

Yup, I see those little squares too.

They don't show up when printed, though, but people assembling only a single tuner shouldn't have to sacrifice trees just to make it readable!

Cheers

Hey, my computer knows what its doing. It's not confused...

Im using Microsoft Windows 98' on an IBM PC.
Im guessing it's just because the manual was written on a Mac.

Well, you get the squares on Windows 98. Mark gets them on (what I'm assuming is) Linux. I don't think that the manual was created on a Mac, but it shouldn't make a lot of difference, since it was created by Ghostscript. Weird.

I don't get it on either my 98 box or my 2k box, so I dunno what's up.

I'll bet it's in an Adobe Acrobat FAQ somewhere on the web. Or perhaps someone's knowledgebase or bugbase.

Might be a UTF-8 vs. Latin-1 thing, but I'm not sure how to find out.

I don't have the squares either, mine looks fine, what ver. of acrobat were you using? Oh im using win98 acrobat ver. 5

I'm using version 4.

Knowing Adobe/Aldus' track record with these things, it's probably a goofy conflict with a printer driver or a postscript/font driver of some kind. Those having trouble: Do you have postscript fonts installed on your computer, or just TrueType?

5.0.1 - 9/17/02
(I got both types of fonts)

My ISP's mail server was out for 24 hours until yesterday and also went again last night. Sounds like its having problems again.

It's a little known fact... but receiving emails with currency symbols in them will cause an ISP's server to crash.



tanstaafl.