RE: [Marxism] quoted-printbale, encoding, and unreadable posts

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Les suggests to outlook users:

"Go to Options --> Mail Format --> Settings, and choose for MIME: Encode
text 
using None and automatically wrap at 76 characters when sending."

There are no "settings" in the Mail Format tab of Outlook 2003. There is an
"Internet Format" button that takes you to a dialogue that has "plain text
options" including wrapping lines at XX number of characters (76 is the
default) and an "Encode attachments in UUENCODE format when sending a plain
text message" check box. Doing an outlook help search for "quoted-printable"
did not return any results that seemed useful.

I googled this string: quoted-printable email "outlook 2003"

I discovered that in Outlook 2003, Microsoft changed a number of the
defaults (inserting hard returns after every line in plain text messages,
for example), which you can conveniently undo hacking the XP registry -- by
hand. The less adventurous are screwed.

The default settings in 2003 are apparently different than in 2002 (Office
XP -- I think!), which in turn are different from 2000. For some reason, no
changes came between 98 and 2000, but there were a bunch between 97 and 98.
Not just the defaults change, but the way you change the defaults also
change, except in 2002, where the setting dialogues are broken and adjusting
settings in detail is therefore impossible.

Oh yes, please take into account that Outlook(s) work totally different
depending on whether they're going through a Microsoft Exchgange mail server
or using POP3 mailboxes. Earlier versions don't even support POP3 when used
with exchange servers, nor vice-versa. You had to choose one or the other,
not both.

In addition, I can report from my own personal experience that Outlook 2003
changes the content of messages when it eliminates what it calls
"unnecessary line breaks." What look like perfectly formatted posts when
being composed become unreadable staircased multiple lines preceded by ">>"
which were not in the original post once they come back in the inbox. Then
the rest of the post after lines that start with >> become all long lines.
This "feature" works even if you email yourself, which means it is built
into outlook, not the result of any interaction with a list serv program or
anything like that.

Clicking to UNDO this elimination of unnecessary line breaks eliminates the
unnecessary line breaks as well as the extra >> characters in what is quoted
at the top of the text, but reduces the line length to what the original
post called for, i.e., reintroduces unnecessary line breaks.

This behavior is different depending on whether you're using Outlook 2K or
2K3, or perhaps it depends on whether it is set up as a Microsoft Exchange
or Pop3 client. All I know is that the one at work and the one at home
pretend to be the same program but really aren't.

My sysadmin at work explains that Outlook really was just meant as a Lotus
Notes killer, to monopolize the corporate email market, which required
making it INcompatible with other mail programs. They then found out people
didn't want to change email programs when they got home or wanted to access
work emails from home. 

They also made it dependent on the exchange servers to enable it to be used
with computers that emulate brain-dead terminals, something that's never
taken off, and to make the mail on those servers unreachable from other
programs, even if it is reachable by terminals, two goals that weren't easy
to reconcile.

The end result was that the hacks that were done to make it industry-norms
noncompliant were hacked again to make it less incompatible but the core
functionality is all tied in with the exchange servers and that is simply
not internet standards email.

By the way, the auto-archive and backup features that worked perfectly in
the 2000 release candidate I used until a couple of months ago are broken in
the street-legal 2003 pro version, or redesigned so cleverly that I can't
figure out how to make them work.

This is just Outlook, not Outlook Express, which also works differently in
different versions, but I did not research it in detail. I stopped using OE
because it crashed long posts and would blow up its store files when they
reached a size of 4000 kB. 

These factors may be related to why Les's exhortations to do it this way or
that way don't seem to have the desired effect. Either the settings in
outlook have been changed, or they do not do what they claim, or they do
what they claim to half the message but not the other half.


Joaquín



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