?<< Please have some sympathies for people who read the mailing list at http://www.bikelist.org and for those who search the archive to answer age-old questions, to avoid bothering the CR population.>>
Don:
I have recently received quite a few complaints about my messages (and apparently other?) arriving as undecipherable gibberish. I suppose that is what you are referring to... The unfortunate problem with that idea is the fact that I have beensending mail to the CR list in exactly the same way for all these years!
Now I suppose some changes could be taking place with email services that are unbeknown to the user but... ? I certainly haven't opted for Base64 or anything else.
Our generous host has been asked if he knows the root problem but I think he is similarly befuddled. We shall see how it all shakes out....
Dale
Dale Brown Greensboro, North Carolina? USA http://www.classicrendezvous.com
-----Original Message----- From: donald gillies <gillies@ece.ubc.ca> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Cc: com@ece.ubc.ca; hilarystone@blueyonder.co.uk; alex@phred.org; joeb-z@comcast.net; oroboyz@ece.ubc.ca Sent: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 4:46 pm Subject: [CR] Please DO NOT post Base64 messages
Dear Folks,
a number of people have recently been posting messages to the CR mailing list using base64 encoding:
http://www.hcidata.info/
I think this might be a case of some mail readers getting clever with special control characters outside the 7-bit characters that are typically carried in SMTP mail, or it might be some sort of a preferences issue in mailer setup.
Messages posted in base64 are very difficult to view in the archives. You basically have to cut and paste them into a converter like the one at the URL listed above. I have the impression that most people read the archives for "today" (like I do) at http://www.bikelist.org because there is so much traffic on the list. If you do this then none of these base64 messages appear in english.
Messages posted in base64 can never be found in a search of the archive. The contents of these messages are lost forever to the search engine, and they are just wasting space on the disk at http://www.bikelist.org.
Please make efforts to have your messages posted in cleartext. Please avoid characters outside 7-bit ascii (i.e. avoid special symbol charaters such as the pound character or accented characters.) Please have some sympathies for people who read the mailing list at http://www.bikelist.org and for those who search the archive to answer age-old questions, to avoid bothering the CR population.
Thank you,
- Don Gillies
San Diego, CA, uSA