[lbo-talk] Technical point

[Les Schaffer]

Jordan Hayes wrote:
>
> Here's our position: mailing lists are a text medium, and thus work 
> best when plain text messages are posted to them.  Some long-time list 
> members insist on sending other-than-plain-text messages, and the 
> archiver that is built into Mailman (the list software we use) does 
> the best it can. 

i've been working on solving the one-long-line problem for Lou Proyect's 
marxism list. unfortunately, the fix requires a two line change to the 
Mailman source code. let me know if you are interested.

the problem is not just html-formatted posts. some email applications 
now allow the receiving end to handle  formatting, and as a result emit 
paragraphs as one long line. in addition, Tahir's post came in 
plain-text but the content was quoted-printable as i recall. all this 
can be fixed easily with MHonarc archives, but Mailman uses its own 
archiver, and so requires the aforementioned small change.

Les