Re: AUDITORY Digest - OT

[Dan Ellis <dpwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>  I have never seen an advantage in sending emails in html OR rtf
>  formats.

To be fair, there is some small advantage in being able to add text
styling to messages (bold, etc.).  But they are rarely used.

I think the issue is much more that recent email interfaces make it
hard for the user to tell whether they are sending plain ascii or
HTML/MIME mail.  Despite being personally a strong supporter
of plain ascii messages, I was, without realizing it, sending MIME
mail for several weeks when I switched to using Gmail (it's the
"Plain Text" link to the right of the text styling bar immediately
above the message body window).

MIME messages are quite annoying to anyone using a pre-1995
text-only email interface, e.g. the Emacs-mh mode I used up until
a couple of years ago.  But the main problem is with Listserv's
Digest mode, which doesn't handle MIME at all gracefully even if
your mail reader is MIME-aware, as Rick points out.

Until the Listserv is upgraded to handle this (and it's a rather large
change, requiring the mail processor to reinterpret every message),
the best solution is to go back to individual message delivery
for those of us using archive format.  Not ideal if you prefer to see
just one AUDITORY message per day, but quite possibly preferable
to trawling through oceans of HTML tags and meaningless binary
encoding.

You can switch to individual messages with the options at the
bottom of your AUDITORY subscription details page.  If you've
lost the link, I can mail it to you.

  DAn.