Hi Bob, thanks for re-sending his message to me. My machine had deleted everything from each '=' to the end of the line. Now his post makes a lot more sense! I fully agree with you that anything but text-based email is highly annoying. I also use a text-based mail program (elm), and I am very happy that the category theory mailing list usually carries high-quality and highly readable (i.e. ASCII) messages. I vote for keeping this system. Thanks again, -- Peter Bob Rosebrugh wrote:
hi Peter,
On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, Peter Selinger wrote:
I was just trying to look up a message in the categories archive at ftp://tac.mta.ca/pub/categories, and I found that the archive hadn't been updated since November 7, 2003. Is this maybe some sort of software failure, or do you normally update the archives manually?
it's manual, and usually done about once every six months - I realize not a good system, but seemingly almost no one consults the archives anyway - I get less than a query a year even when I fall quite far behind, one reason for never putting the effort into doing something better...
The concrete problem I had was that today's message by
and a more serious one...
schanuel@adelphia.net arrived in my INBOX with all '=' equal signs removed - some mailer along the way had tried to "autoconvert" from
actually that was a stupid human trick: I use a text mailer, and ludditely imagine that everyone should. Accordingly, for categories messages I trim anything that isn't text (we may be few who use text any more, but we really dislike all the spurious characters and html pollution), and then forward only the text part of multipart messages. Obviously I needed to learn something about the Content-Transfer-Encoding field before doing this, but failed to. Since I have been doing this for years, it amazes me that no one has complained before now. In any case, I'll try to remember to kill the field when cleaning out what I don't like.
Perhaps after doing it for 14 years, I should try to recruit someone more modern should take over the list.
almost unreadable so I tried to see if the version in the archive was
well, I did update the archive to the end of Feb, but that won't help you, so in a minute I'll fwd the (unmodified) version of Steve's post...
Sorry about the difficulty,
best wishes, Bob