At 16:36 9/22/95, Mathew Lodge wrote:

Well, no, actually. Customers don't care who's fault it is -- as far as they're concerned, it's broken. I had a similar situation impressed on me today: one of our customers wants to send e-mail with MIME attachments to one of his customers who has a CompuServe account. The attachments never make it through the CompuServe e-mail gateway.

Now, we know that this is not a problem with our TCP/IP network and SMTP implementation -- it's a problem at the CompuServe end. The customer knows nothing about e-mail gateways, and nor does he care. As far as he's concered, it doesn't work. And Omnes, as his solutions provider, had better fix it.

I still haven't worked out how to appease this particular individual: but my point is that customers dislike "finger pointing" when it comes to resolving a problem. It won't wash.

There is NO problem sending MIME Email with attachments to Compuserve accounts (I do it all the time). The only requirement (until Compuserve rolls out their promised MIME-Aware Gateway and support) is that the user must save the message as a Text File and then pass it through Mpack to do the actual MIME Extraction. If the customer needs handholding, pass him/her my Email address and I'll provide Step-by-Step instructions (for both the sender and recipient).