[FFML] Question about how to keep the text as is after submitted

[Dennis Carr]

Weighing in late here - first chance I've had.  Not with the admin hat,
but with the sysop hat.

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:15:37 +0200
Kalle Blomster <kalle.blomster at gmail.com> wrote:

> As for the UTF8 support... mutt (Unix terminal-based client) supports
> it (and so does all decent terminal programs and SSH clients).
> Microsoft Outlook supports it (yes, even ancient versions). Eudora
> (version 8 and on) supports it. 

You forgot Pine. =^_^=

It is granted that the vast majority of email programs will support
HTML and just about whatever else is thrown at it.  

Honestly, SMTP itself sort of supports.  RFC 822 doesn't - but that's
the base mail standard for mail transfer, and does not call for file
formats in the first place, so that's mot. UTF-8 seems to come in as an
attachment, as does HTML - and this is how the mail programs for the
most part understand it.

Several facts remain.  This list will support ASCII at a 72 character
word wrap, will eat HTML markups for breakfast, and is supposed to also
eat certain attachments (images, programs, .zip files, .rtf files, etc.,
etc., ad nauseam) for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, between meals,
and any other time it sees them attached to an incoming post, before it
starts putting it through the distribution daemon. It is quite hungry,
after all. Or something is - I think a dragon comes with mailman, and
the list daemon feeds the HTML and the attachments to the dragon. But I
digress.

If I'm not mistaken, unicode files will (or are supposed to) pass
through, but I still ask that you include it as an attachment and leave
a basic text version, per standards, as the primary body.  Most mailers
will see the UTF_8 and defer to that - leave it to the mail program,
not the transfer mechanisms.

The point is that I run the list like this because the vast majority of
us like it like this, but moreover, *I* like it like this.  This is
pretty much how the list will run.  If UTF-8 is broken on list, no
problem, I'll fix it - it's trivial, and is characters.  But HTML and
RTF will remain formata non grata on this list, and we ask that you
adhere to that request.

-Dennis
(list op)