tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Dec 07 07:59:55 1995
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Re: HoS'etlh's annoying mailer
>Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 19:53:24 -0800
>From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
>>------ =_NextPart_000_01BAC3BC.23A20A80
>>Content-Type: application/ms-tnef
>>Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
>>
>>eJ8+IjQRAQaQCAAEAAAAAAABAAEAAQeQBgAIAAAA5AQAAAAAAADoAAENgAQAAgAAAAIAAgABBJAG
>>ACABAAABAAAADAAAAAMAADAFAAAACwAPDgAAAAACAf8PAQAAAEcAAAAAAAAAgSsfpL6jEBmdbgDd
>>[...]
>HIja'. mu'meyvetlh vIghovta'. veQvam vIghov je.
>charghwI' De'wI' DachoH HoS'etlh De'wI'.
>qay' 'ej wIngaSnIS. chay' mavang? tI'laH'a' "listserver"?
Qaghbe'qu' "listserver".
OK, let me try to straighten things out.
Email was and is a means of transmitting *plain* *ascii* *text*. Many
mailers don't support anything beyond ordinary 7-bit ascii. That's all
email does; it sends text from point A to point B. And that's all the
listserver does: you send mail into it, and it sends mail out to all the
recipients. It doesn't alter or tweak or mangle or muck with your text in
any way, with the exception of putting its own headers on.
Some mailers now in use (especially on PCs and Macs) have for some reason
seen fit to start encoding the text they mail out. The MIME encoding is
not a universally-adopted standard so far as I know, and is mostly used so
that you can write email with spiffy color and font changes which your
word-processor stores in binary codes... which then need to be encoded so
that it can be sent safely over mail-systems which may eat non-text
characters. The listserv is *N*O*T* adding that stuff at the bottom. It
doesn't add things to your letters. Anything you see is there because
that's what was sent to the listserv (or maybe it was added between the
listserv and your machine). That garbage at the end is there because some
people are using mailers that feel they have to mimencode text on the way
out. I think you can disable this by sending your mail in "raw text
format" or something, but you'll need to experiment with your mailers
yourselves. You can't ask the listserv even to recognize these things and
omit them since (a) it wasn't designed to scan its mail, and (b) sometimes
we WANT to have such things. It is the responsibility of the SENDER to
make sure that the message contains just what it's supposed to contain and
nothing else. Don't blame the messenger.
~mark