On 21 Jan 2007 at 07:42, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@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.
Thank you for the time and care you took with your response. I'm somewhat computer challenged to begin with, so I have forwarded your response to my computer guy who's in Vermont for a while. We'll see what he can come up with to help improve things.
I hope I trimmed this response better this time.
Marc Riddell