META: Yet more line-wrapping (was RE: ECON: What Jim Legg doesn't understand)

Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Fri, 7 Feb 1997 16:30:18 +0000


On Wed, 5 Feb 1997, Jim Legg wrote:

> For example, your mail reader
> can't wrap-long lines (maybe Netscape 4.0 beta 1) therefore the problem
> must be in my Microsoft Outlook 97 mail sender. Pass the buck - problem
> solved :)

To be blunt, your Microsoft mail program seems very badly designed. This
message is almost impossible to decipher because it's not conforming to
long-established Internet standards such as quoting and line-breaks. The
only way I can tell which parts of the message are quotes and which are
your responses is by the way that the quotes have line-breaks and your
comments don't. The program also appends 7k+ of meaningless junk onto the
end of each message, wasting my disk space, adding to my download time,
and making Pine include MIME garbage when I reply. All hail Microsoft for
yet again attempting to impose their ideas on the rest of us.

You are, of course, free to claim that our software is broken, but if you
intend to communicate with someone then it is your responsibility to do so
in a manner they can understand. Your weirdly formatted messages have proven
so difficult to understand that recently I've just been deleting them. It
probably looks wonderful to someone using another Microsoft mail program,
but it looks like nonsense to me.

> I don't advocate privacy of any kind. If my entire database, warts and
> all, were available on the Internet, that would be so much the better.
> Have we now got to the crux of the matter?

You're not David Brin posting under a pseudonym, are you? We did all this
in December.

Mark

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