On Mar 7, 2007, at 5:06 PM, Simon Varnam wrote:
your mails (which come to me in the digest) get heavily peppered with things like this: "=0D=0A=0D=0A", (see below) .
<rant>Those are artifacts from a combination of Mailman's conversion of HTML email to plain text and a sender's non standards compliant email application (MSN/Hotmail in this case). By the time you add in a reader's other non standards compliant email application trying to decipher the already munged up message it can get to be a problem. The best possible solution is for everyone to send plain text email to the list. We do not allow MIME content on the list because it greatly increases the size of messages and introduces a whole host of potential security issues for all members. It's not uncommon for a message written in Microsoft Office (Word and/or Outlook) to come in at over 40KB, when a plain text equivalent would be less than 2KB. Those who are paying for connection time by the minute and/or have slow connections don't appreciate having to download that much bloat.</rant>
I'm realistic enough to know that any chance of persuading all subscribers to use only plain text email died about 15 years ago :-) Mailman (the list server software) could do a better job of handling some of the more common formatting atrocities it sees on a daily basis, and hopefully that will come about sooner rather than later, but in the meantime, I'm afraid we're stuck with some of those quirks in the system. Now, if everyone would simply stop using Windows...
<ducking for cover>Dan ==================== Dan Phillips Associate Professor Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music University of Memphis [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
