X-Message-Number: 10587 Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 01:43:52 -0400 (EDT) From: "Kevin Q. Brown" <> Subject: Administrivia: Ugly Email This message is about the form, not the substance, of CryoNet messages. Here is the problem: An increasing number of CryoNet messages are posted in formats that make the digest hard to read. Traditionally this has been a result of new users who have not yet trained their mail programs to behave properly, but now it is due mainly to the new, MIME- and web- aware email/browser packages that seem to be losing the capability of generating simple ASCII messages. The types of problems I have seen (not all on CryoNet) include: (1) Word processor ASCII dump - one long line for each paragraph. (2) Email composed with a variable width font (not a fixed width font such as Courier), which usually results in lines longer than 80 characters. (3) Replies that contain the _entire_ previous digest. (4) Replies (such as unsubscribe requests) that are sent to the CryoNet posting address rather than "". Fortunately, the software usually catches these automatically, but people who misspell "unsubscribe" in creative ways can elude that filter. (5) Overly long messages. (It is much nicer to give a URL to a large document rather than blasting the entire contents directly to everyone on the mailing list.) Currently, CryoNet limits each individual message to 40 KB (including the email headers). (6) Base64-encoded MIME attachments (usually images, binary executables, MS-Word documents, or even TNEF files). These are not appropriate for a text-based digest, so they are truncated automatically from CryoNet messages. (7) "Quoted-Printable" MIME attachments. These currently are the worst offenders. They consist mostly of readable ASCII, but include funny control codes containing equal signs that uglify the messages. Worse, the latest variety (from Outlook Express) confound my hack for repairing CompuServe email lines that have been wrapped around prematurely, and the result is a message with lines that are both long and illegible. (8) Appended HTML copies of the ASCII text. Fortunately, these seem to be universally redundant, so no information is lost by truncating the messages automatically when HTML attachments are detected. (9) VCARD "signature" MIME attachments from Netscape mailers. (10) Weird, non-printable, or hyperascii characters in messages, which look incomprehensible, terminate digests prematurely on DOS machines, or make some US ASCII - based mail readers think that the messages are binary code. I now have a simple and effective filter for these characters. My efforts have not always succeeded, though. My first filter for the DOS End-Of-File character Control-Z (Decimal 26, Hexadecimal 1A) accidentally filtered out all instances of the number "26" from messages! See Message #5210 "CryoNet Feature #26" for the full story. Possible solutions to the badly formatted message problem include: (1) Ignore it and live with it. (2) Automatically reject messages that are formatted badly. (3) Automatically reformat messages that are formatted badly. (4) Change the CryoNet digest format to a set of MIME attachments. I don't like solution (1), solution (2) seems inhospitable (except for obviously erroneous, voluminous, or redundant messages), solution (3) may be difficult to do properly, and solution (4) would make CryoNet digests indigestible by traditional mail readers. That leaves solution (3) as the method of choice. Reformatting "Quoted-Printable" attachments seems to be the most important task at this time, so, unless I hear strenuous complaints, I'll install software that (A) detects "Quoted-Printable" attachments and (B) reformats them to fit into 75 columns without any of the control codes that uglify those messages. Hopefully this software will resolve the "Quoted-Printable" problem without introducing new and exciting problems of its own. Kevin Q. Brown Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10587