OK, let´s start with the most important thing

      The Bomi FAQ ,-)

Q:	Where to find all the MIDIs Bomi is posting to a.b.s.m?	A:	On Bomi´s harddisk - there´s no web or ftp site where you can download them directly. Some of his favorites are available on another page - click here to go there. If you´re looking for a specific MIDI send him a mail...
Q:	Bomi sent me an email "Posted - watch the group..." but the postings didn´t show up on my server?	A:	Be patient - email is ways faster than news. It could take some hours or even one or two days until the postings reach your server. Emails are transmitted directly from the sender to the receiver while news are transmitted from server to server all over the world.
Q:	Is Bomi a musician, sequencing all the MIDIs himself?	A:	No - he just loves to listen to MIDIs, to collect them and to share/trade them with others... Read his postings in a.b.s.m carefully, there you´ll find notes about who sequenced the MIDIs...
Q:	I wrote Bomi a mail but never got an answer - why?	A:	Bomi is posting with a fake address (NotForMail@...) in a.b.s.m because he don´t likes SPAM and UCEs. There's a "Reply-To" in the header which you should use - but note that you have to remove the underscores from this address before sending your mail!
Q:	It´s so much work to decode and save all the MIDIs from a.b.s.m - will Bomi send them to me by email as ZIP?	A:	No, sorry - doing Internet in Germany is pretty expensive, he pays a lot of money for postings to a.b.s.m - a budget for sending ZIPs by email is not given by his minister of finance ;-)
Q:	I read news via Deja News, but unfortunatly they don´t save the attachments - will Bomi send them to me by email?	A:	No, sorry - see the previous question - it would be too expensive. And as there are a lot of Deja News users it is simply impossible - it would take too much time to select, ZIP and send all the stuff again. Ask a friend with access to a decent news server if he can download the MIDIs for you or connect to another public news server and download them from there.
Q:	I missed a series of MIDIs Bomi posted recently - will he repost them for me?	A:	No, sorry - see the previous questions - it would be too expensive. When posting series of MIDIs this happens due to several requests he has received over the past weeks/months from several users. So if a repost is needed this will be done if there are enough new requests for a particular series. You may ask other users of a.b.s.m who have captured the series to send you a ZIP...

A: And finally lets talk about a problem regarding decoding errors reported by Forte Agent on Bomi's postings: When you try to launch or save the attachment, Forte Agent (Note: the $$$-Agent, NOT the Free Agent!) complains about decoding errors. When you ignore this error message, the MIDI saves/plays just fine. This error message is only shown in Forte Agent v1.5x, earlier/other versions of Forte Agent don't show this behaviour! And it's not related to Bomi's postings - there are reports telling that this also happens with some other attachments like GIFs or JPGs. On the other side other clients like Netscape's Navigator, Microsoft's IE, MS Mail & News, News XPress, WinVN and many, many other applications don't have any problems with Bomi's posting. Conclusion: This ugly behaviour only concerns users of Forte Agent v1.5x trying to decode Bomi's postings. So what's the reason for this?

Bomi is managing his MIDI collection with an Access database. This database has a build-in NNTP interface which allows direct postings to a.b.s.m - without this there would be no reasonable way to service that much requests. This interface uses MIME/multipart/mixed format with embedded UUEncoded attachments. And this is what - so far as we figured out - confuses Forte Agent. When detecting MIME/multipart he expects to find a MIME/base64 attachment. This is not the case, so he shows an error message. When you ignore this message and Forte Agent invokes the decoding routine, this routine correctly detects the UUEncoded attachments and handles it right - the file saves/plays without problems. So why not switch to plain ASCII/ANSI postings with UUEncoded attachments or just use MIME/base64?

Lets answer the second question first: 99% of the a.b.s.m users are having no problems with UUEncoded attachments, but 50% are having problems with MIME/base64 - for e.g. the Forte Free Agent can't handle MIME/base64. So it's clear to use UUEncode to avoid ugly nag-mails ,-) As to the first question: The NNTP interface is a third-party-product that only can post in MIME/multipart, not in plain ASCII/ANSI. a.b.s.m is a hobby, so Bomi can't sit down and develop an own NNTP interface, he has to use what's available. Any solution now? If we'll find an NNTP interface which can post plain ASCII/ANSI with UUEncoded attachments we'll switch immediately - 'til then: Sorry for any inconvenience...

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