[Farmall] message formatting

[Anthony Flint]

At the risk of getting flamed for posting 'irrelevant drivel', another
suggestion for improving the list:

Many E-mail and Usenet News reader programs, usually the mail and news
reader programs that come with browser packages, allow users to include
binary attachments (MIME or other encoding) or HTML (normally found on web
pages) within their E-mail messages. This makes URLs into clickable links
and it means that graphic images, formatting, and even color coded text can
also be included in E-mail messages. While this makes your E-mail
interesting and pretty to look at, it can cause problems for other people
who receive your E-mail because they may use different E-mail programs,
different computer systems, and different application programs whose files
are often not fully compatible with each other. Any of these can cause
trouble with in-line HTML (or encoded attachments). Most of the time all
they see is the actual HTML code behind the message. And if someone replies
to the HTML formatted message, the quoting can render the message even more
unreadable. In some cases, the message is nothing but strange looking text.
For this reason, many mailing lists especially those that provide a digest
version, explicitly forbid the use of HTML formatted e-mail.


* Setting your mail client to plain text

You should always look at your mail clients Help to find out how to set your
messages to send in plain text. As each mail client is configured
differently, there is no uniform way to set this, however when setting the
format, it should be set before starting a new message as otherwise the
setting may only apply to that message (and sometimes it will apply to new
messages created after that one).

* Example for Microsoft Outlook 98
To check if your mail client is set to 'plain text format' use the following
instructions: On your email client select 'Tools', 'Options', then you
should see 'Message format' with a 'send in this message format' pull down
box. This should be set to 'Plain text'. Once you have clicked on OK any new
messages created will be in plain text format.

* Example for Outlook Express
Note that these tips are based on one particular version of Outlook Express
(version 5.00). Details may vary from version to version. These are
reasonable settings to use all the time for most people, but you may prefer
others. Also note some steps related to Internation Settings have been
removed.

   1. Start Outlook Express
   2. Pull down the Tools menu and select "Options...".
   3. Click on the "Send" tab.
   7. Back on the "Sending" page, under "Mail Sending Format", make sure
"Plain Text" is selected.
   8. Click on the "Plain Text Settings..." button.
   9. Under "Message format", make sure the "MIME" option is selected.
  10. Make sure "Encode text using" is set to "None".
  11. Click "OK" to finish with the "Plain Text Settings" dialog.
  12. While you're here, it would be a good idea to make sure that "Plain
Text" is also selected under "News Sending Format". That setting is not used
on the mailing lists, but it is considered bad form to send HTML messages on
most news groups.
  13. Click on the "Compose" tab.
  14. Under "Stationery", make sure "Mail" is not checked.
  15. Under "Business Cards", make sure "Mail" is not checked.
  16. Click the "Security" tab.
  17. Make sure "Encrypt contents and attachments for all outgoing messages"
is not checked.
  18. Make sure "Digitally sign all outgoing messsages" is not checked.
  19. Click "OK" to finish with the Options dialog.
  21. Exit Outlook Express.

Further information on Configuring Other Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII
Text is available from http://www.expita.com/nomime.html