Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 20:57:52 -0500 (EST)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at keithlynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Nebulas
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Barry Newton <bnewton at ashcomp.com> wrote:
> It works if you clip off the obnoxious =20 that Michael's email
> system slaps onto almost every line of his posts...

That's MIME.  One of many obnoxious things that "smart" email programs
do.  Pretty soon they'll be so smart that we won't be able to communicate
at all.

I prefer a really stupid email program.  One where *I* provide all
the intelligence, and it does exactly what I tell it to, rather than
assuming it knows better.

Note that when he quoted your message the =20 got re-MIMEd into =3D20.

Instead of trying to clean it up, I have the list set up to simply
reject the worst offenses (HTML, base64, PDF, MSWord, RTF, etc) and
to pass on everything else.  I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to
automatically un-MIME all messages.  (Undoing HTML, PDF, etc, would
be much harder.)

MIME has never been much of a problem for me, since I memorized ASCII
decades ago, so I can read hex almost as easily as plain text.  Which
came in handy during the anti-"Internet Decency Act" demonstrations,
when some of my fellow protesters had signs which said things in hex.
Mostly very rude and indecent things, it turned out.

What I do find obnoxious are messages quoting all of the previous
message, which in turn quotes all of yet another message.  Sometimes
as much as seven levels deep.  Am I the only one annoyed by this?
Or should I automatically trim quoted messages?
--
Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable.  Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.