James B. Byrne wrote:
> Up until quite recently the vast majority of the messages that I 
> received from this list consisted of plain text.  I now find that 
> at least half of the data I receive in the nightly digest is 
> incomprehensible html or mime64, the bulk of which is taken up with 
> formatting commands.  Is there some why to stop this?

This is "partially" due to new software.  Almost two weeks ago, raven was taken offline and migrated to a new server and the Listserv code updated to the latest 14.4 codebase.  We were on 1.8d (and yes, they changed their numbering convention, 1.8d was 6 revisions behind 14.4).  For all the gory details of what has changed, you can refer to LSoft's Release notes at http://www.lsoft.com/resources/manuals.asp

In a nutshell, your issue with HTML in the digest is due to:

* Your subscription entry was set to "NOMIME DIGEST"
* The posting you quoted was submitted in HTML format *only*

The new Listserv handles attachments/MIME much better (for better or worse).  I haven't changed 3000-L's configuration to allow attachments [yet] and it is still set for Language= NOHTML.  What happens to the postings?

* Text postings are distributed and archived normally,
* HTML-only postings are distributed and archived intact,
* Multipart/alternative (HTML and text) posts have the HTML stripped (the NOHTML option above)

Attachments/HTML are saved with their MIME boundaries.  If you have a NOMIME subscription (or digest) you won't get MIME encapsulated articles, and the result is gibberish (what James was seeing).

If you use "MIME DIGEST" you will get individual messages separated into MIME parts.

If you use "HTML DIGEST" you will get an HTML-formatted digest with hyperlinks.

And as Tracy noted:
> I found that responding to the list via web-mail will do that to the
> recipients.  So I try to avoid web-mail.

Webmail most often sends exclusively in HTML format.  This gets messy for people who read their mail with plaintext mail clients, or get inadequately tagged digests.

Otherwise, some notes about the "new and improved raven":

* New homepage format (http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE).

* List postings are antivirus scanned

* Much faster, searches are much faster, but bear in mind we have archives back to 1995, so please take advantage of the date range option in the search dialogue (e.g., "since 2002", "since Aug 1999", etc).

For those of you with multiple list subscriptions on raven (and you know who you are):

* Subscriber's corner (http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE?REPORT&z=3)

* Search multiple list archives simultaneously:
  (http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE?REPORT&z=4&9=A&A=9)

And much more.

Enjoy!  And let me know if you run into any problems.

Jeff

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *