> On Yahoo, you have a choice of 'rich text' or 'plain text' as a setting. It's just a click away. I thought it might be similar for others.
OK, but according to the thread, LBOtalk strips HTML messages: for example, I always get nice plain text email from LBOtalk here on my Mac with its Mail.app client.
I don't see how receiving plain-text messages with "rich-text" checked would be a problem. The opposite is believable, but that would depend on LBOtalk sending HTML mail to someone with "plain-text" checked. And it would look really different, because you'd be getting all the HTML tags uninterpreted, you wouldn't be seeing question marks.
Here's the encoding of a recent message from Alan Rudy:
> Content-type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
> Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
And here's the encoding of the first message I sent on this topic:
> Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Both of those qualify as "plain-text," but your email client may not be happy with "quoted-printable" or a "windows-1252" character set. So until you know which emails are causing the problem, you can't very well prescribe a fix, if any.
HTH, Charles