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Introduction

Lissuns,

Some problems keep cropping up on the List every few months. This guide is a compilation of the preferences and thoughts of many lissuns. The amazing Jane Skinner designed the page . The technical consultant was Bob Jernigan. The guide doesn't predict future trends in telecommunications or software and formatting standards. It is for this List, now. These are not 'recommended' standards but 'required' standards. Ignore them only at your peril.


 

 

Summary

 

Text Formatting

Most people would prefer it if their messages could be read by all lissuns. Current list members seem to be using combinations of the following:

Operating Systems 

E-Mail Packages
Windows NT
Windows 95/98
Windows 3.1

Linux
AIX
Solaris

Mac(s)

OS/2
 Netscape and Netscape Communicator
Outlook
Outlook Express
Internet Explorer
AOL's mail package
Eudora
Pine
Elm
Pegasus Mail
Claris Emailer
Post Road Mailer
[and there are many more e-mail programs so we could have missed quite a few]

 

Diffent types of text formatting:

ASCII (Good)

The only sort of text that can be easily comprehended by all users of the many possible combinations of all those operating systems and e-mail programs is PLAIN TEXT which is also known as ASCII. It is an International Standard, the Internet e-mail system was designed to carry it and it will probably always be readable by any text editor, word processor, e-mail or news program. ASCII text cannot be formatted to show colours, underlines, bold or italics and that's why people use * and _ for emphasis and > for quoting. It is close to the boring old stuff that we on the List have been reading and writing all of our lives.

 

HTML (Not good )

HTML cannot be read by many people using text-based e-mail programs. Your pretty colours and effects will look like a lot of little codes in angle brackets with the odd word just discernible here or there .

That's because an HTML version of an e-mail is an ASCII file containing your text plus some codes governing its colors and fonts.  E-mails sent in HTML take up a bit more more hard drive space to store, take a bit longer to download and may require more system resources to read than ASCII does. They make opening the e-mail program even slower for those who hoard your wonderful stuff. Usually, an e-mail sent in HTML is also sent in Plain Text. Two messages in the one e-mail can be tiresome, especially for lissuns getting the List in Digest form.  Furthermore, Microsoft and Netscape seem to have their own proprietory HTML tags just to make sure that we won't all be compatible. Even the official HTML standards have changed over time. Painful lissun experiences suggest that it might leave one person's composition window as green on beige and turn up in another person's read window as red on puce. Or something.

 

Rich Text (Bad!)

If something describes itself as Rich Text or Enhanced Text it means text that has such extra formatting as colour, fonts, bold, italic etc and one system's Rich Text may not look pretty or even be legible in another system's read window. The Norton Patrick O'Brian Listserv software may not be able to read it and you may never be able to jump ship.


 

Attachments (Bad!)

Attachments are other files sent along with your e-mail: images, sounds, word processor documents.  They have to be converted to unreadable encoded ASCII to fool the Internet email system and reconverted to their original format by your email program. ASCII can be encoded as MIME (Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions) and Base64 and uuencode (ah, so that's what they're for!) . Sometimes, such encoding appears in the body of the recipient's email - no pictures etc, just pages and pages and pages of hieroglyphics. Alice says attachments appear in the Digest form of the Gunroom in hieroglyphic form only and that sometimes one attachment will fill a whole Digest. So, set Encoding to None or to 7-bit ASCII or failing that, 8-bit ASCII. It's also a good idea to turn off 'vcard' signatures which, though very small, have been known to start major wars on other lists because of their status as 'attachments'.

Warning Some attachments, e.g. Word and Excel files, can carry macro viruses.

Some months ago, Michael Trick referred us to some statistics relating to his Archive. There had been a lot of hits from surprising places. Poland was one. It may be that there are potential lissuns who have slow connections, slow computers and software that is a couple or more years old?

 

Word Wrapping

The default that most e-mail programs will set for their composition windows seems to be in the range of 70 to 76 characters per line. It's an acknowledged ideal line length.   A word wrap set to 74 means that you type your paragraphs as one continuous line, the e-mail program putting in carriage returns just before the message is sent -- these carriage returns break the paragraph up into separate lines of  no more than 74 characters in length.

If you don't have a wordwrap on and you type your paragraphs in as one long line, the message can usually be wordwrapped by the receiver, something like 'File, Wordwrap'.  However, some people's e-mail packages can't do this; for them, the paragraphs will not broken up to fit onto the window or screen, but will each appear as one long line.  These people will see only the first few words of each paragraph in your message.

Shorter lines enable your words to be quoted, often indicated by "> " or other characters.  If your lines are 80 characters long, and somebody wishes to quote what you've said, it will probably be broken up like this: 

> The sudden rearmament that followed Napoleon's escape from 
> Elba had done 
> little to thin the ranks of unemployed sea-officers by the 
> early spring
> of 1815.

A similar effect would occur if, say, people tried to view an 85-character-width message in a window 80 characters wide. 

The easiest way to ensure that your lines aren't too long is to set a word wrap of 74 characters or so and trust to your e-mail package to put carriage returns in. A warning: if you have a word wrap on and put your own carriage returns in after the wrap width, you may also find that your lines are broken up.

 

The Techies Speak

Bob:

"Settings can affect many aspects of your mail but there are two classes of settings that we are concerned with. The first class controls what you see on your computer. Mostly we don't care if you like to read your main with orange on red 24 pt sans-serif fonts. The settings we care most about are those that control what you send. Most packages will have an option that allows you to select "plain text" or html. For mailing lists always select plain text because while what you're looking at my seem great on your machine, others may not be able to handle it. Another setting that is important is "word wrap". For mailing lists, always turn on word wrap.

Why are these setting important? It's simply that all machine and e-mail packages are not compatible. Many software developers, such as myself, use ASCII-based editors because we find we cannot keep up our productivity with GUI editors. We timeslice mail reading while waiting for compiles and other things to happen. Fancy fonts, colors, single-line messages look like garbage to us. Pictures and fancy html documents don't have to be sent in the e-mail message, it's better to send the URL."

Attachments cause bandwidth bloat, especially when the attachment is a picture or sound file. If you attach a picture that adds 800 lines to your mail message and send it to the list, the list serve will create a copy of each recipient and pump about 20 million bytes into the Internet. Had you put the picture on your ISP and sent the URL, only about 24K bytes would have been sent.  If you don't have any web space, inviting interested lissuns to contact you individually and e-mailing them copies of the file would also be better.

Bill:

Mail messages don't go through the internet in one big lump. They are divided into packets of various sizes. The first few bytes of each packet include an intermediate destination address, the final destination address, a packet identification, the source computer and the size of the packet. There is also a check-sum included that confirms that the packet as received is the same as the packet as sent. If the check-sum verifies a valid transfer, the receiving computer sends an acknowledgment back to the sender. If the sender doesn't get an acknowledgment, it resends the packet, otherwise it sends the next packet. These little packets will chase around the internet, being forwarded through various gateway computers until they reach their final destination, which will reassemble them into the message. If any packets are missing, the receiving system will send a packet to the source requesting a resend.

All this takes a really long time, so a five page message may take as much as ten seconds to get from London to San Francisco-- longer if there is much network congestion.

At the receiving end, the computer knows this is a mail message because it came in through "port 25" (part of the address information of a packet). The message is directed to the mail program, and here is where it gets interesting.

A sophisticated mail program, like Netscape Communicator, can interpret most standard message types. The header of the message will tell the reading program whether it is 7-bit or 8-bit text, has any attachments, what version of MIME was used and what the break points in the message file look like. If the message has been sent with formatting information, it will ignore the plain text version and display the formatted version. If a picture is included and the computer has the appropriate program, the image will appear, too. Any necessary plug-ins will be applied and the attachments will also be available to be saved to disk. At one time (I haven't checked since upgrading to 4.7) Netscape (deliberately ?) misinterpreted MS enhanced so the colors were garish and difficult to read.

A sophistcated text-based program will strip all formatting information and treat what's left as plain text.

A text-based program designed for non-graphical interface will display the whole message, including formatting instructions and the encoded attachments, as text.

There are many people who still use text-based mail readers, such as elm, pine or UNIX mail or mailx. For them, any formatted messages are a pain!

Many ISP's will block any messages over a certain size- usually somewhere between 100 KB and a half-MB. AOL does this. We have 116 AOL members currently on the list, the [name suppressed because he apologised so winningly]'s 5.5 MB message would have consumed over half a gigabyte of AOL's disk space-- all at once. They might have been able to handle it; or it might have brought their mail services down. Better to block and be safe.

So the bottom line is: Please set up your mailer to send plain text to all lists.

 

Settings, or How to Achieve the Ideal E-mail

If we look in the menu bar of our e-mail programs we will find references to Settings or Properties or Options. Here are some settings that may help us all:

 

Outlook Express

Options -> Send -> Mail sending format
Choose Plain Text and the following settings:
     Encode text using None
     Automatically wrap text at 76 or fewer characters.

 

Internet Explorer 4

Format -> Plain Text 

 

Netscape Earlier versions

Plain Text was sent by default but, if you need them, the settings are under:
Options -> Mail & News Preferences -> Composition

 

Netscape 4.5 and above

Sending plain text
HTML is the default.  There are two ways of changing this.

If you have decided to eschew HTML forever, choose: Edit -> Preferences.  Then expand the "Mail & Newsgroups" list if it's not expanded already, and click on "Formatting".  Then choose "Use the plain text editor to compose messages".

If you just can't beat the HTML habit, you can leave it as your default and choose to send plain text to the Gunroom.  You have to create an entry for the Gunroom in your address book, if you haven't done already.  Then, in the address book, select the Gunroom entry and click on Properties.  If "Prefers to receive rich text [HTML] mail" is selected, unselect it!  Then you have to go into Edit -> Preferences and expand the "Mail & Newsgroups" list if it's not expanded already, and click on "Formatting".  Then in answer to the query about sending HTML to an address not marked as being able to receive it, choose "Convert to plain text".

Setting the word wrap
Choose: Edit -> Preferences.  Then expand the "Mail & Newsgroups" list if it's not expanded already, and click on "Messages".   Type your chosen width in the "Wrap outgoing plain text messages at" box. You might also want to choose "Wrap incoming plain text messages to window width" while you're there.

 

Pegasus Mail

Tools -> Options -> Sending Messages.  Don't choose 'Send Rich Text'. 

 

Eudora 3.1

Special -> Settings -> Sending Mail ->Word Wrap.

 

Outlook 2000

From within an individual message, if you normally send Rich Text or HTML:

New Message -> Format -> Plain Text (this also works for replying to or forwarding a message that arrived in Rich Text or HTML).

For default Plain text for all messages:

Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Message Format -> Plain Text.

For Plain Text for the Gunroom only:

Contacts -> open the entry for The Gunroom-> under the email address, check the box that says "Send using Plain Text"-> Save -> Close.

To set word wrap:

Settings -> Line Length - > 74 or less.

 
Many thanks to the lissuns who are sending the exact settings for their particular email program. This page is continually being revised, so keep sending your stuff to the honorary webmeisterin (Helen) by emailing it to hell.kelpie  at  bigpond.com .

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