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Re: gEDA-user: "Analog" books



Bill Gatliff <bgat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Quick OT question about the format of this email, which I see used a lot
> on this list.  Are you using an automated email filter to generate these
> references, or do you do it by hand?  If the former, what is the name of
> the software?

There unfortunately exist some netiquette-deficient people who send HTML
E-mail and post such to mailing lists.  Apparently this list tries to be
nice and autoconverts such HTML mail to plain text, probably by running
it through good ol' Lynx, and what you are seeing is the output of that
conversion.

It is also very common for electron and bandwidth wasters to send their
messages in the super-bloated MIME multipart/alternative format, which
is plain text followed by HTML.  This list's MIME filter is misdesigned
or misconfigured with regard to handling such messages: the right thing
to do would be to simply delete the HTML part with extreme prejudice and
pass only plain text through, but for some strange reason this list
converts the HTML part to plain text but still leaves it there in the
multipart/alternative structure, so you get two plain text copies: one
generated by the original sender, the other generated from HTML by the
list's MIME filter.

I see all these mail abuses while others are blissfully ignorant of them
because I refuse to use mail clients that would do things behind my back
and instead I read all my E-mail raw, exactly as it travels across the
wires.  That has some unfortunate side effects: for example, anything
that comes through this list from Kai-Martin Knaak and a few other
less regular posters usually gets deleted without reading on my end
because those messages arrive encoded in base64, i.e., gibberish to a
raw mail reader, and it's far too much pain to save them and decode them
externally.

MS


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