Greetings, I've received a few private messages this week and there is an ongoing thread dealing with complaints and problems with folks sending fancy formatted messages to the Silver List.
I ask and recommend that members turn *OFF* all the fancy formatting options they can when they send mail to the list. THE REASONS: Some people will not be able to read your message, because of widespread incompatibilities between different e-mail programs. Yes, a lot of people use Outlook Express or AOL, but many do not. Microsoft and AOL are well known for *not* following accepted standards and have introduced many conflicting "features," technical messes that the rest of the industry is still trying to clean up after. Some people will be presented with difficult color combinations, strange fonts, a dozen screens full of HTML code garbage with your text deeply intermixed and difficult to decipher, or other completely unpredictable distortions of the pretty message that you *think* you are sending. Some people who subscribe to the digest version of the list will be unable to read your message, and perhaps many others as well. Often, one message will screw up settings that will then destroy the readability of the rest of the digest. Also, most of these "smart" mailers are extremely inefficient, including two complete copies of your message, one in plain text and one with fancy formatting, the latter being several times the size of the simple text version. Then there's the ubiquitous stationery and all sorts of cute things people like to add to personalize the "look" of their messages. Not everybody in the world has a high-bandwidth connection to the internet, folks! And some people still pay on a per-minute or per kilobyte basis for mail forwarding and download. You are wasting these folks' time and money for the privelege of seeing your message with pretty colors, fancy fonts, and even cutesie animations and background music!! Lastly, if you include *too* much extra junk, your message may simply end up too big and not get sent at all! The posting size limit for the list is 40 thousand bytes. Add your own message to some quoted text, with a cute graphic or two, and you'll soon discover that your message won't even be posted to the list. HOW TO: To turn off fancy formatting and send plain text in Outlook Express: Click TOOLS>OPTIONS>SEND and select Plain Text under Mail Sending Format. Also make sure that the checkbox is *unchecked* next to "Reply to messages using format in which they were sent." Click OK. Anybody have similar instructions to guide users of Netscape, AOL, or Mac's?? CONCLUSION: I have not enforced plain-text as a list rule for the simple reason that too many people do not know how to turn off the stuff, and it's more important for them to be able to post and get the help they need than it is to make them jump through hoops for the convenience of the rest of us. But turning off Stationery, HTML, Rich Text, and all other fancy formatting *IS* the *POLITE THING TO DO* on e-mail discussion lists. Please make the effort to learn how to send plain text using *your* e-mail software. Thank you! Be well, Mike Devour silver-list owner [Mike Devour, Citizen, Patriot, Libertarian] [mdev...@eskimo.com ] [Speaking only for myself... ] -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. Instructions for unsubscribing may be found at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@eskimo.com>
