And now, from the world of unbelievably arcane email minutia, comes this:

In GroupWise 7.00, create a new message, enter some text and bold a few bits, thus making the message HTML format.

Now, add an attachment, say a bitmap.

And finally, add another attachment, this one an HTML file called Text.htm.

Don’t send, but rather, just close the mail window, at which point GroupWise asks if you want to save the draft. Save it to some folder.

Now, go to that folder and open the email. Your Text.htm attachment has evaporated! The other attachment should still be there.

Same thing happens if you were to just send the email, which is quite handy when the file you wanted to attach is actually called “Text.htm”.

Turns out, this would appear to be a bug in the way GroupWise handles attachments and HTM emails. Internally, they save the HTM body of the email as a FILE attachment called, you guessed it, TEXT.HTM. In some cases, as when you simply send the email directly, GroupWise properly HIDES that Text.htm attachment from attachment enumeration. But in other cases, such as when you open that saved draft message and send it, GroupWise fails to hide the attachment properly.

Which means that if you’re enumerating attachments in an outgoing GroupWise email, you need to be aware of that or you might end up processing the body of the email as if it were actually an attachment. That may or may not be something you want to do.

At least with Outlook, the HTML body of the email is flagged in such a way that it doesn’t show up when enumerating normal attachments. You have to go out of your way to retrieve the HTML or RTF body text of a message.

Gotta love those gremlins!