Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 10:17:32 EST From: "The Ashes of Ideas" Subject: TECH: A Short Diversion about Email Let's start with a bit of background. Basically, let's suppose that you want to post something. There are three main stages involved. SENDER: You write it, then push it through a mail program. You may write it in another program (an editor or word processing package or some such). [herewith the law of starting clean. set your editor or word processing package to use a boring fixed-width font such as Courier 12. set your line length/margins to 65-75 characters. and (under Windows) save your work as MS-DOS Text with Line Breaks, then close the file and tell your word processing package not to save the extra formatting. Open again, then use ctrl-a (select all), ctrl-c (copy), and ctrl-v (paste) to put the text into the mail message. Do not edit after that within the mail program, for it may do weird and wonderful things. If you write your work in the mail program, try to set the options to similar defaults--send text as ASCII with line breaks...] [and the law of lowest common denominator is like unto it. Hunt through the options in your mail program to try to set Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii and Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit. Avoid the dreaded charset=ISO-8961-1 and the paths of Content-Transfer-Encoding: Encoded-printable or Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64, for your reader's sake...] INTERMEDIATE: when you post to the list, the message goes over the wires and through the internet to MITVMA.MIT.EDU. A program there (the mighty program known as LISTSERV) looks it over, decides that you have made a worthy submission, and starts cranking through the list of members. It sends a copy to each one (subject to the limitations of topic filtering, if the member has selected topics and the poster has used an identifiable tag). READER: a copy of the message comes to them, via download, little funky icon that says "You have new mail" or whatever route they may use. Now, the mail reading program they use tries to figure out what to do with what it got. dumb old readers may only know how to deal with the ancient rites of ASCII. This is the lowest ritual of email, and all mail readers must know about it. newer, fancier readers may look at...Base64! BinHex! text/rich! text/rtf! and other splinters from the mind of mime, microserfs, and johnny appleseeds sprouts--and handle some, cough and almost handle others, or turn their heads aside in horror at some. [To say it plain--everything reads ASCII. Matching mail readers handle other types, but you do lose a few readers when you stray into the other forms.] Incidentally, fairly recently someone was complaining about "long lines". I looked at those postings, and the postings mentioned were using "encoded-printable" to send lines without any line breaks. The mail reading program was doing the right thing--pasting the long lines back together--but it wasn't wrapping the resulting text. If you have figured out the correct settings for your word processor/mailer and want to provide directions, I'll be happy to archive them. Consider it a small exercise in technical writing... Rather quick, and definitely not well-rounded prose, but... it might help? tink (oh, and please, please, be very careful with attach or include--they tend to come out in strange and numeric formats...)