Lakota wa- 'variety object'

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Kathleen Shea wrote:
> However, the original message on this topic, from Regina, came out
> unreadable on my computer, as seen below.  Did anyone else have this
> problem?

I believe the original letter used some HTML-based formatting.  This looks
nice if the receiving mailer is capable of handling it, and can look like
gibberish if not, so I still recommend against it for communications with
the list, even though more and more mailers support it.  I don't know any
way to prevent this, or keep people reminded of it.  Perhaps it can be
filtered out in the list mechanisms.  I'll look into it.

In fact, I use pine in a terminal window myself, which is pretty
old-fashioned, but newer versions of pine have gotten pretty good at
filtering out html, so I glazed past the "index of attachments" at the top
of Regina's letter without even noticing it, and the letter was readable
in pine.  Quotation marks in some of the subsequent communications came
out pretty wild at times, but I assumed this came from using a European
character set, presumably a necessity of life if you are German.  I
suspect I could fix this in pine, if I were smart enough ...

Sooner or later I will be forced to switch to the University's webmail, I
suspect, as the ancient Sun Unix terminal server I use is on its last
legs, and from time to time the University sends out ominous announcements
about the desirability of conversion.  I've been avoiding web mailers
since I was first forcibly converted to the Hotmail web mailer by MSN.
Under its fat-crayon graphics this is a feature-less piece of garbage
basically best suited to sending sequences of messages on the order of "Ya
me 2.  How R U. :-)."  You can even save several of them in the one saved
messages folder they allow you - I mean U.  You can't download the
messages to your own system.  No wonder the service is free.  It's
worthless.  The main purpose of Hotmail seems to be to keep you from using
Outlook Express and thereby falling afoul of its security holes.