Garbled messages

[John McChesney-Young]

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 12:36:58 -0800, Joel S. Berson <Berson at ATT.NET> quoted
my post and wrote in part:

> One possible difference of opinion:
>
>> I experimented by sending myself messages in RTF from my Gmail account
>> to
>> my POP account both with and without a URL and didn't have any trouble
>> reading them, so somewhere a server (possibly the one running the ADS
>> list
>> at UGA?) is where the encoding format problem lies.
>
> I think URL's come through fine in plain text, and don't need any
> styling (HTML or whatever) or encoding.

No difference of opinion; I agree. The reason I mentioned URLs was that
Ben Zimmer had written:

<<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.>>

and so I experimented with messages that did and didn't include a URL.
Most if not all modern e-mail programs recognize URLs in plain text
messages and turn them into links which will open with a browser.

John

--
*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis~at~pacbell.net  **  Berkeley,
California, U.S.A.  ***