On Sat, 6 Feb 1999 Richard Flohil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I've been noting Joe Gracey's sterling defence of the Mac (I've got one
>too), but I wonder if it's the fault of this machine (an LC 520) that I
>when I get the Digest all Mike Hays' and Buddy Rocket's posts come twice -
>one in English and one in complete, utter, and total gibberish.
> The English ones are usually thoughtful and/or amusing; the others
>are a pain in the butt 'cos you've gotta scroll through them, and they're
>always MUCH longer than the English version.
> Is there a computer whiz who can explain, in English, why this is
>so and what, if anything, I can do about it.
I'm no computer expert, so the details might not be exactly accurate, but
here's the gist of it: The problem is that Buddy and Mike and some others
are sending posts to the lists in a multi-part Mime-encoded format-- notice
that, in the header portion of those messages, you'll see something like
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_00C1_01BE5296.368AF140"
instead of
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
So what you're seeing first is a text version of the message, then a
Mime-encoded HTML-icized version of the post. If you were getting P2 on
the single-message basis, your mail program would probably handle the
message just fine, putting the two parts together and displaying it in all
it's (possible) multi-colored, multi-font glory. Since we're getting it in
the digest, we see it as two messages, one fairly readable and one
gibberish. On your mailer, do these posts then hose up the formatting for
all messages that follow? It does on mine-- Eudora Pro, although it didn't
on Eudora Light on my old PC. I don't know if there's some tweak I haven't
found yet on Pro, or if this is "an enhancement."
So, anyway, back to the question, "what can I do about it?" As long as
we're getting the digest and people send such encoded messages to the list,
I don't think there's much we can do other than keep hitting the <page
down> key. . .
Larry
