Russ,

Things have changed: software developers have become both ignorant and
contemptuous of efficiency concerns. Fortunately for us, most users' storage
allocations have increased; but whatever their limits, some will always push
the envelope.

My lists are populated by engineers working on data communications
standards. Even some of them have no idea how their contributions are
formatted, so I wouldn't expect your teachers to know the details.

One of the great hassles I went through was when Microsoft produced the
following combination:
(a) A new version of Outlook was preset to use Word as its default mail
client;
(b) Word, by default, attempted to repurpose HTML as a document-control
language by inserting detailed font-control sequences in every line;
(c) Word's notion of "plaintext" was to do exactly the same thing, but
switch the specified font to Courier.
An Apple imitation of item (c) might be why you've got a user who's sending
alleged "plaintext" with HTML.

The size expansion for Word's HTML versions was astonishing. I had people
complaining about hitting the size limit (then 100K); when I asked for a
look at what they'd sent, I found it expanded to seven times the size of the
actual content. Of course, the more large messages, the more users would hit
the limits of their storage quotas, leaving me to deal with both error
reports and lapses in communication.

My solution was to strip HTML using
   Misc-Options= DISCARD_HTML
Occasionally, someone sends HTML mail with a bunch of graphic attachments
(corporate logo, signature, and lately, Facebook and Twitter buttons) and
the result looks strange, but it's not like they weren't warned: the
stripping of HTML is announced on the Web and occasionally in my cycling
sequence of "pet peeve" notices in the top banner. For the most part, this
relieves me of damage-control duty because the plaintext gets through.

I've still had to relax the size limits (300K now) to accommodate
attachments, because the engineering community gradually destroyed my
attempts at permitting only selected types, But that happened slowly enough
that I've only got a couple of chronic storage-quota bouncers.

I can't address digest and archive questions; the IEEE uses a separate
archiving system instead of ListServ's built-in capability, and thus digests
aren't supported on my lists.

Hal Keen


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