"David W. Tamkin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > | Yes, plain text is much easier than hand-composed HTML/rich text, which > | is why we smart folks are using plain text here :) > > What I was speaking of, Tom, was not the effort of typing the markup from > scratch -- which the sender isn't doing -- but rather that of selecting > the effects (the MUA's composition routines would then insert the > requisite markup for them). Users of mailers with default markup > settings, of course, don't have any idea of what they're sending. Right, and what I was speaking of was the kind of HTML/rich message markup that the average list manager actually encounters most of the time, i.e., inadvertent or automatic markup. There is an inversion of "poster intensiveness" depending on the kind of client software in use. If one's mail application defaults to plain text unless prodded to do otherwise, then it is less poster intensive to go with the flow (as I am doing here with Mulberry) and stay in plain text, rather than tweaking various settings and forcing fonts and stuff. If, on the other hand, one's mail client is like AOL6, which arbitrarily switches to HTML in response to a huge number of rather non-intuitive things (pasting a URL into the text will often do it, for example), or Outlook Express, which encourages you to have a 'personal decor' for your correspondence, then it is more "poster intensive" to have to keep around little Post-Its with six part instruction sequences for plain-text-izing your messages to avoid the wrath of that curmudgeon at JEEPSALES-L, than it is to just write and send like you do with everyone else. Anyway, that's well ground-driven so... By the way, if you want the textbook example of a list management DISASTER, consider the case of the Cinestream forums at Media100.com . For years they had been running an NNTP server in-house that let you read and post to dedicated newsgroups for their fancy digital video editing software; or you could get a daily listserv index, or a digest, or individual messages. The traffic was pretty high so most people apparently either took the index or read the newsgroup. So this week, for internal management reasons, they got rid of the NNTP server, and moved everyone onto a new Listserv machine. In the process they simply took ALL the addresses that had been registered in any form, and dumped them all into the single-message bounce mailing list! It took about six hours before the approx. 2,000 member list was in a full screaming "r*move me dammit!!!" bounce storm. A full day after the switch, some befuddled engineer from the company finally posted saying "Sorry - we're working on it!!" I don't know for sure but I suspect that they lost their list/nntp "guru" and are learning from scratch. I thought of the happy fraternity here while watching the carnage...
