Re: Reminder: What to do if your mail to the list bounces

["A. Joseph Ross" <lawyer@attorneyross.com>]

On 9 Feb 2003 at 0:27, Garrett Wollman wrote:

> (If on the other hand you are unable to send mail to the list but you
> *don't* get a bounce, it's usually because your mail program is under the
> misapprehension that your mail is really a Web page.  I get the rejections
> on these, rather than the original sender, but I usually don't have the
> time to edit them into the proper form so they don't get posted.  AOL
> users tend to have a problem with this, because AOL's built-in e-mail
> system makes it very difficult to send a correctly-formatted mail
> message.)

AOL apparently decided some while ago that they were going to use their position as a large 
service provider to force the net to adopt HTML as the standard for e-mail.  They haven't 
succeeded, and some e-mail client software renders incoming HTML as gibberish.  This may 
be one reason why they have lately been losing subscribers.  Another may be that their 
monthly fees are higher than many ISPs.

My current e-mail client does handle HTML, but I've found that I generally get better results 
by setting it to show e-mail in plain text.  So I can read incoming AOL mail, but even then, it 
tends to have some strange gibberish characters here and there.  I really don't know why 
AOL customers tolerate inferior service at higher prices.

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
 15 Court Square, Suite 210                 lawyer@attorneyross.com
Boston, MA 02108-2503           	         http://www.attorneyross.com