Garbled messages

[Wilson Gray]

Thank you very much for the enlightenment, Ben. I checked my (Mac)
Gmail settings and saw that Format was set to UTF-8. I've reset it to
"Default," the only other choice. Hopefully, matters are now
straightened out.

-Wilson


On 1/14/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Garbled messages
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>