Garbled messages

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 1/14/06, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know what to say or do, y'all. Even my saved copies are now
> all gobbledygook! Hence, I can't  do a re-send. WTF!

As I've emailed Jesse, the culprits seem to be AOL (for Ron and Barry)
and Gmail (for Wilson). If the "rich-text" option is set (in Gmail at
least-- I assume AOL works similarly), then the post may end up
garbled. It won't *always* be garbled, though-- I believe a URL has to
be in the body of the text for HTML coding to get triggered by Gmail
or AOL.

This is based on personal experience, since I often post via Gmail
(even though the Penn address is the one that shows up in my posts'
headers). The only time one of my posts was unreadable for some was
when I sent it in rich-text and included a URL:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0512D&L=ADS-L&P=R1314

But Wilson, don't worry... The listserv archive has all of these posts
in ungarbled form, even if they're unreadable in our own private
archives.


--Ben Zimmer