Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 10:31:15 -0500
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at mail.press.jhu.edu>
To: <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 =3D20 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 =3D20 got re-MIMEd into =
=3D3D20.
>
>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=20
>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?

What, you no like the seven deep messages with the most recent saying "Me =
too!"  Seriously, I think people should take that small extra moment to =
trim excessive lines.  Think Hemingway, not Henry James.

After some poking around on the web I was able to locate a patch to =
GroupWise that allows as an "option" what is called "internet style =
prefixing".  GroupWise normally does top posting, which is fine for a =
business enviroment where the question might be ":Do you have the Smith =
file?" but is utterly obnoxious in the nominal real world.

As for the "Mime" thingie, sorry, I have no idea how to turn that off, or =
if that is even an option.  & it's probably not worth asking the IS Dept =
here since they seemed perplexed over the concept of "internet style =
prefixing".

mjw

>--=20
>Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/=20
>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.
>