I moderate a couple of jazz email lists that use the
same Mailman software as AMPS. Mailman can be set to
accept or reject postings based on various criteria.
Moderators who care about spam and viriii ALWAYS set
Mailman to reject HTML and other stylized postings.
It's simply too easy to embed java script inside HTML
that will execute a bad thing on someone's computer,
or include a web-page redirect that provides the
user's email address to a spammer.
AMPS employs StripMIME. This utility looks for plain
text embedded inside any posting. If it finds plain
text buried in HTML, it reformats the message as plain
text. It's sort of dicey how well this works. If
your emailer sends BOTH a plain text and an HTML
email, you're in luck - StripMIME discards the HTML
and posts the plain text. But you probably have no
idea what your emailer is doing.
AOL has been the nightmare of mailing list moderators
since the late 1990s. Every time you think you've
figured out how to tell your users how to send plain
text, AOL's next version eliminates the ability to
turn off HTML! Microsoft Outlook is only one step
behind, as it defaults to "rich text".
AOL LOVES to send HTML and rich text - odd, since they
were late to the bandwagon on those features. The
moment you make a word bold, underline, italics,
differnt color, font size, etc, AOL and MS Outlook
immediately switch to HTML without notifying you.
Here are workarounds - use them, and your email
reflector moderators and those of us who read the
digest version will really like you a lot better:
1) The AOL web-mail service has a feature that allows
you to send as "plain text". This service is
available to all AOL users, and you use your regular
email address. Also, this is how you can send and
receive your AOL email when you're at someone else's
house, and they don't have AOL installed on their
machine. It's found at:
http://www.aol.com/aolmail/home.adp
2) You can use AOL's "advanced" email software (AOL
Communicator) on your PC. In theory, this also has an
easy option for switching to plain text, although I've
seen users who can't find it. The AOL web page for
this software is:
http://communicator.aol.com/
3) Do what many of us ex-AOL users did - get a free
Yahoo email account. Transports with me whenever I
change ISPs (happens a lot here in small-town-ville)
and there's no problem reading/writing email from
anybody else's machine. Nice bonus: Yahoo has several
flavors of enti-viral products running at once, and in
6 years or so, it has stripped all possible virii - PC
and Mac - from the emails I receive.
OK, back to amps....
Anybody got a spare Alpha 76 anode choke lying about
that they're going to bring to Hamvention and would
like to sell?
73,
Dave W8NF
Date: Sat, 8 May 2004 16:21:34 EDT
From: Ku4uk@aol.com
Subject: [Amps] TEXT Messages
To: Amps@contesting.com
Dennis I have problem sometimes on this site. I think
AOL told me. They
only
send text in HTML Maybe someone here on Amps can
clear this up. Now to
see if
this will be posted. Thanks ku4uk
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
_______________________________________________
Amps mailing list
Amps@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/amps
|