[ Lisa -- Thank you very much! I appreciate your trying to conform to Usenet posting style. Struggling to get software to behave isn't fun; I used to have "Fight sucky software and learned helplessness." in my .sig to remind myself not to give up hope. Below I rant about broken software; it is *not* directed at you! ] Adina Adler <adina at panix.com> wrote on Tue, 11 Jun 2002 09:51:16 > > "Lisa Grant Coffin" <lisa at spindot.com> wrote: > > >DQotLS0tLSBPcmlnaW5hbCBNZXNzYWdlIC0tLS0tIA0KRnJvbTogIkdhbWV0ZWNoIiA8dm9sdHJv > >bmFscGhhQGhvdG1haWwuY29tPg0KVG86IDxkcmFnYWVyYUBkcmFnYWVyYS5pbmZvPg0KU2VudDog > > [rest snipped] > > Everything that I get from Lisa Grant Coffin looks like this. Does > anyone else have this problem? I read mail using emacs rmail, and I > think this system is running in NetBSD. I'm currently also using emacs rmail and *usually* have the same problem. It turns out that her mail program is set to use base64 for its Content-Transfer-Encoding. I downloaded and compiled a base64 en-/decoder from http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/base64 or thereabouts, and then just recently found out that my version of emacs (20.7.1) has base64-decode-region as a built-in function. Whoops! (I also wrote an elisp function to massage a dragaera digest so that undigestify-rmail-message would work.) However, a recent reply of hers to Mike Schiffer came out fine: "Lisa Grant Coffin" <lisa at spindot.com> wrote on Tue, 11 Jun 2002 09:49:07 > Michael S. Schiffer <mss2 at attbi.com> wrote: > > > I don't use Outlook Express either, but people on r.a.sf.w. seem to > > recommend OE-Quotefix to make Outlook quote and attribute properly. > > It appears to be available for download (it's freeware) at > > <http://jump.to/oe-quotefix/>. Looking over the features, it looks > > as if it can do everything Lisa wants it to do, plus a few other > > things. > > Thank You Mike! That sure was easy. Yay! That came out nicely formatted. (Having the time and date as part of the attribution isn't a big deal to me.) I'm don't know what, if anything, you can do about it in Outlook Express, but one more gotcha to be aware of is auto-wrap, long lines, and/or a paragraph typed as "one long line" with RETURN typed at only the end. This is a sort point with me, so now I'm going to rant about it. =============================================================================== Below are 4 illustrations of what can go wrong. (If one's mail program auto-formats received messages, what one sees might not match what I've sent, which can be infuriating: How do you fix what you can't see?) But first, a quick tutorial on ">" as punctuation in Usenet style: the number of quote characters ">" at the start of the line is supposed to correspond to the author. If this were an an email message from Alice: Fred wrote: > Bob wrote: >> Hi? > Bye! Sky. Then here is who said what: Bob: Hi? Fred: Bye! Alice: Sky. Note: a possible point of confusion is that the attribution has one less quote character than the text that person wrote, e.g. "> Bob wrote" has 1 quote character, but his text ">> Hi?" has 2. If this correspondence is tampered with, then people accustomed to this use of punctuation will get confused about who said what, which is a problem in Examples 2 - 4. Example 1. Emacs shows a long line by wrapping it, but using blackslashes to indicate that it doesn't fit on the current line: I'm don't know what, if anything, you can do about it in Outlook Express, bu\ t one more gotcha to be aware of is auto-wrap, long lines, and/or a paragrap\ h typed as "one long line" with RETURN typed at only the end. Below are som\ e illustrations of what can go wrong. Example 2. When a long line gets quoted, Usenet style can make it look like the "1st line" is written by one person, and the "remaining lines" are written by someone else! > I'm don't know what, if anything, you can do about it in Outlook Express, \ but one more gotcha to be aware of is auto-wrap, long lines, and/or a paragr\ aph typed as "one long line" with RETURN typed at only the end. Below are s\ ome illustrations of what can go wrong. Example 3. When quoted text gets rewrapped, quote characters can get embedded, adding another problem on top of Example 2. > I'm don't know what, if anything, you can do about it in Outlook > Express, but one more gotcha to be aware of is auto-wrap, long > lines, and/or a paragraph typed as "one long line" with RETURN typed > at only the end. Below are some illustrations of what can go wrong. This is worse than (2) because of the embedded quote characters. Example 4. When long quoted lines get broken (instead of rewrapped), you can get a "fencepost" effect, which has the same problem as Example 2 in spades, *plus* is rather hard to read. > I'm don't know what, if anything, you can do about it in Outlook > Express, but one more gotcha to be aware of is auto-wrap, long lines, > and/or a paragraph typed as "one long line" with RETURN typed at only > the end. Below are some illustrations of what can go wrong. Grr! - tky