On Mon, 4 Aug 1997 15:14:02 -0500 Gilbert Brenson Lazan said:
>Good morning:
>
>I am a rank newbie owner of a Spanish-language list (FACESP-L out of
>[log in to unmask]) who spends half his life lately with one hand
>on the keyboard and the other on the Listserv manual.  I cannot find the
>answer to this problem, however.
>
>There has been a fair-sized conflict on the list lately between the
>Spanish-language purists that see my insistence upon the elimination of the
>use of non-ASCII symbols (accents and puntuation such as =E1, =E9, =ED, =F3,=
> =FA, =FC,
>=F1, =BF, =A1) as a subversive attempt at cultural hegemony.  I maintain=
> that it
>is a pragmatic concession to those that can't read those symbols and get a
>mess of other stuff instead of the accented letter.
>
>My question is where is the problem?  Does it lay in the e-mail software
>(as some insist) or in the keyboard programming (as others insist) or in
>the server capabilities (as I have been led to believe).
>
>Thanks for any light you can shed on this and thanks a million for all the
>help I have received through this list.
>
>Best wishes,

Given that Albany is still on VM, the following might be of some use
to the Albany Listmaster.  Obviously I'm no guru at this.  ;-)

>09/25/96: Wednesday
>    Used a procedure researched by Listowner Nicholas Graner of France
>  to supposedly make us fluent in 8-bit ASCII.  I used the command:
>  "convxlat french standard" after auditing the various tables available.
>  After restarting Listserv we lost about 105 postings due to it messing
>  up the addresses in its B64 distribution files.  I don't see why, but
>  I backed out the change, restarted and apologized to the victims.
>
>09/30/96: Monday
>    Used "CONVXLAT CANADIAN STANDARD" under TCPMAINT to install an 8-bit
>  ascii translation table from Jean Bedard, [log in to unmask]  This
>  was provided via Nicholas Graner
>