For those members of the cognet mailing list who receive the messages
in Digest form there will be some substantial changes. We are
changing the default digest form from "tradition" (or legacy) to
MIME. Every modern email program should be able to handle MIME
digests, but if you are not familiar with what it looks like, it will
be bit strange and will take some learning to navigate. Please have
patience with it.
Also note that this is just a default setting. You may still request
traditional digests on your subscription preferences page (start from
http://aomlists.pace.edu/
and follow links and login instructions from there).
Fabio and I aren't certain at this point whether the changes to the
default will affect current digest users or just new members. If you
are still getting traditional digests, I recommend that you switch to
MIME Digests unless you have a very good reason not to. Please read
below for a somewhat rambling description of what MIME Digests are and
why they are a good idea for most users. (I tried to find a web page
that described this, but couldn't, so I quickly spewed out the
following).
With traditional digests all of the messages were catenated "raw" into
a larger message that got sent out daily to digest subscribers. This
worked fine in the days when all email was in US-ASCII and perfectly
readable that way. But over the past 20 years, newer ways of handling
mail allow mail to be sent using different character sets. Now this
is where things get tricky. The mail *transport* systems still insist
that the stuff being transmitted by US-ASCII (and there are good
reasons for that). So the solution has been to use an "encoding" to
pack things like UTF-8 or ISO-8859-X into something that the transport
system likes.
One kind of encoding (which works for ISO-8859-X but not for UTF-8) is
something called "quoted-printable". This is the one with all of the
"=20"s in it. Often these are readable, with effort, if you are
confronted with it raw. But for other things, an encoding like base64
is used. These are not readable by humans.
Now when a Digest is put together the different messages in it may
have different requirements. Some parts may be in US-ASCII, some
parts might be in base64 and other parts might be in quoted-
printable. Traditional digests simply stick them all together raw.
A MIME digest will create a special kind of message (called a MIME
Digest). You can think of a MIME Digest as an email message that has
a whole bunch of attachments, each of which is an email message. Each
individual attachment (email message) can have its own MIME type and
transfer encoding for its content. And your mailer should do the
right thing with each individual one.
Another advantage of MIME Digests is that when you open an individual
message within a digest, you can respond to that specific message
(with its original subject and just quoting that particular message).
Also, you can save those individual messages in a digest individually.
So expect some changes. It will take some getting used to, but it is
worth it.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
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