Subject: Re: AUDITORY Digest - OT From: Dan Ellis <dpwe@xxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:01:40 -0400 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>> 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.