On 21 Jan 2007 at 07:42, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>
wrote:
This is my very first experience with a Mailing List
of any kind. Please
bear with me. Are you saying that, when replying, I should delete all other
material on the original message except the exact statement(s) I am replying
to?
Normal netiquette (though subject to some degree of debate, as with
just about anything on the Internet) is to trim down the quoted
material to the relevant portions and reply beneath them. Exactly
what is "relevant" may be up for discussion; certainly, the exact
statements you're replying to are relevant, and perhaps a little bit
more that's related to them (lest you be accused of taking quotes out
of context), but certainly such things as message headers and
footers, and entire paragraphs that have nothing to do with anything
you're replying to, are irrelevancies that should be snipped.
Here, mailing list reply style differs from the style often enforced
in corporate communications, where they insist on preserving the
entire thread history (somewhat wastefully) in order that the
participants can follow the CYA (cover your ass) principle by showing
that they received all parts of the previous messages (even while
often showing, in their replies, that they failed to have any decent
degree of reading comprehension as to actually understanding any of
it).
More info:
http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/
As for your other problem, with character sets, your mail program is
apparently putting in such things as "curly" quotes and apostrophes
in the proprietary Macintosh character encoding, which has these
characters in different positions from the proprietary Windows
character encoding that many of the readers support; however, your
messages are also going out without any header indicating what
character encoding they are in, which means that standards-compliant
readers should render them as US-ASCII, a 7-bit character encoding
containing only 128 different characters (including control
characters) which does not include any of the "extended" characters
of either the Mac or Windows proprietary encodings, or of more
standardized encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8. What it means is
that you're better off sticking to plain-ASCII straight quotes and
apostrophes unless you can get your program to send the more exotic
characters in a standards-compliant, platform-independent way.
http://mailformat.dan.info/body/charsets.html
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site:
http://mailformat.dan.info/
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http://webtips.dan.info/
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http://domains.dan.info/