NYCkayaker Never Mind

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Sat, May 01, 2010 at 06:20:18AM -0700, Harry Spitz wrote:
> I?forgot the way computers sometimes misquote when we try to copy
> other posts. Bullet points are sometimes converted into question marks.

First, kudos to you.

Second, this presents a teaching moment, so I'm going to take advantage
of it. ;-)  One of the reasons why this document:

	http://www.rockandwater.net/list-policies.html

includes this point:

	ASCII TEXT: Send your messages in ASCII text only.

is that sending messages any other way sometimes leads to issues
just like this one.  Person A using mail program B sends something which
has an ASCII and an HTML version; person C with program D replies, but
it turns out that program D can't deal with the character encoding for
punctuation inserted by program B (or maybe program B did it wrong)
and now what ends up being sent is a mangled version of the original.
Add to this mail programs which don't properly wrap lines combined with
other mail programs that can't deal with really long lines, fold in the
hideously awful HTML markup added by some mail programs, salt with a pinch
of oddball character sets and pretty soon the whole thing goes to hell.

Bottom line: always send mail in ASCII text, and *only* in ASCII text, unless
you have a prior arrangement with all the recipients for something else.

---Rsk