me> [Gripe about non-ASCII email]
MikeG> I'm seeing this increasingly from certain lists/individuals.
MikeG> Neither I nor the senders seem to know what to do about it.
Ha. Apparently not. :-\ Your post on "corporate partnerships" use
the same non-ASCII 3-byte sequence to represent both apostrophe and
double-quote. (Although the posts that you originate without
inclusions are plain text.)
What to do about it.... I haven't used MS Windows since 3.1 so I have
only peripheral or general knowledge about how to make it do what you
want.
The first step would be (if you can bear to do it) is use dedicated,
non-Microsoft email software. Don't use email capability of a web
browser or Outlook/Outlook Express for email. KISS -- use the least
featureful email software you can find. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Windows_email_clients
Eudora and Pine have long track records.
Never "drag" a page from your browser into an email message. Windows
tries to make the resulting email look (to you) as much like the web
page as possible, with utterly unpredictable results. If you send
email with a browser itself, don't, for the same reason, tell the
browser to insert a web page into outgoing mail. Whatever "features"
you may have available to "just put the web page into mail", don't do
that. Just say no.
Whatever program [1] you use for mail, grovel through the the
hierarchies of menus till you figure out how to:
Enforce "plain text", (aka "7-bit ascii" or just "ascii") for
outgoing mail.
(My wife has just shown me that you can do this in
MS-Outlook's Tools->Options->Send menu popup.)
Disable UTF-8 for outgoing mail.
Disable sending of HTML mail.
For Mac users, disable duplicating your email message in that
proprietary Apple format.
Obviously, if you communicate regularly in Hebrew, Russian or Japanese
or if you need to send mail to destinations, such as US government
contract bid offices, that make procrustean demands for specific
formats, you won't want to do that. In that case, things become too
complicated for me, as a non-Windows-user, to advise on.
Use mail software that incorporates a usable editor that can be forced
to do "plain text". Treat text as you would have a typewriter-created
page. Copy and paste text from other sources. Some current MS
programs may actually have disabled this in order to force you to
transfer format details from web pages, MS-Word docs, RTF, PDF etc. I
have no idea how to defeat such a "feature" if it in fact exists
except to switch to Linux. Most people think of the Linus alternative
in the same light as if the old gag were offered as pragmatic advice:
How do you lose 40 ugly pounds of excess weight?
Cut off your head.
I wouldn't have posted this gratuitous pontification had you not asked
on-list. Since I'm here, I'll digress even further. Or maybe, ever so
tangentially, I'm drifting back on topic.
It may be Quixotic project, trying to encourage plain, simple email.
My own approach is, insofar as possible, to keep everything as simple
as I can get away with; work close to the bare metal; take everything
apart to see how it works; maintain fine-grained control; and just
ignore or work around anything that makes such an approach utterly
impossible. Some people to whom I've said these or similar words
hotly, even belligerently reply,
I'm an expert artist [businessman, banker, journalist, whatever]
and I leave everything else to other experts. Do you know how
your kidney works? I leave that to a physician. Do you know how
your car works? I leave that to a mechanic. I just *use* a
computer and leave how it works to a specialist.
Actually, I *do* know how my kidney and my car work. I majored in
chemistry because I wanted to know how stuff works. I specialized in
biochemistry and physiology because I expected (well, hoped :-) to be
using my body for a long time and wanted to understand it. When I
left science, I worked as an auto mechanic because I expected to be
using cars for the rest of my life [2] and wanted to understand them.
For 40 years now, I've been raising a significant part of my own food
because living things (in the large, not as biochemical specimens) are
the foundation of human existence and knowing how they work, how they
grow, reproduce, compete, and cooperate, is fundamental to knowing who
you -- who all of us -- are.
So when I got my first computer, in '87, I likewise believed that
computer would be an increasingly influential part of everything for
the foreseeable future. So I learned how my humble CP/M machine worked
and how to program it in assembler and C. When moving up to more
modern machines, Windows was automatically an enemy because it is
*intentionally* made impenetrable so that you can never learn how it
works. Even God didn't do that with the world as three and a half
centuries of science have shown. Linux, consequently, was more than
welcome because the source code was available for anything I cared to
look into. I've made an avocation of neuroscience and (what is
commonly called) the mind/body problem because it's obviously relevant
to how we all work and the most basic and intimate level.
So how can I do all that crap, learning about stuff that has only
rarely or for relatively short periods of time produced any, you know,
cash income? What about having a respectable career? Well, I'm not
smart enough to have been a good scientist. [3] I'm not a great artist
[4] or a wizard programmer or, for that matter, a widely imitated
organic gardener. I'm abashed that, in the face of the erudition of
people I respect, I can't get far enough into economics (another
phenomenon of life-long influence) to get past the impression that the
discipline is dominated by bogosity.
I dunno of the last few paragraphs even tangentially address the
question of the future of work. Most people who are unwillingly out
of work have too many worries to thing about what's actually on the
end of their forks, [5] let alone about how things around them work.
Did I mention "Quixotic"?
Guess I better stop here.
- Mike
[1] Okay, I've dated myself. Programs are now called "apps". Does
that mean that people who used to be programmers are now
applicators?
[2] Not to mention that the auto industry, directly or indirectly,
represented over a third of the whole US economy.
[3] E.g., I failed my 4th semester of calculus.
[4] But when I presented a seminar at MIT showing slides of my work
along with that of famous artist smiths, Cyril Stanley Smith asked
a question about a slide of Jean Tijou's work at Hampton Court,
then said, "Yours is better". That was enough to maintain my self
esteem as an artist indefinitely even were I to live in a
cardboard box and be regularly reviled as a loser by all and
sundry. I once got a Canada Council grant of a few hundred bucks
while the Brits have spent a million pounds restoring Tijou's
screens but I'm okay with that. :-)
[5] ...naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on
the end of every fork. -- Jack Kerouac
(About the title of William S. Burroughs' book)
...people are not bribed to shut up about what they know. They
are bribed not to know it.
-- William Burroughs, _Naked Lunch_
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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