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 ############################ To unsubscribe from the LSTOWN-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTOWN-L&A=1