from Richard Rauch:

> Not everyone has administrative access to ``fix'' the mailing lists.
> (This is probably a good thing.)  Those who do certainly can be excused if
> they have more important things to attend to---but by suggesting a ``good
> desired effect'' (bounce HTML and quoted-printable; warn on FidoNet-style
> long-lines) and having a number of people support it, there's a chance
> that someone with the skill, access, and time will do something.

> I could probably do *something*, but I wouldn't promise that it would be a
> good implementation.  (^&  But, it's not ``the NetBSD way'' to put up a
> half-baked solution.  (I really don't know the best way to reliably
> seperate email-as-HTML from email-that-may-use-HTML[-like]-text.  Maybe I
> just want to tell you how to make a <ul>, or similar.  You don't want to
> thow the baby out with the bath-water, and there are probably some good
> tools (of which I am ignorant) that can handle this efficiently and
> effectively.)

We'd like to stop those messages with a non-HTML part followed by the same stuff
in HTML, but I don't think we want to eliminate all traces of HTML.  One might
want to include a clickable HTML-tagged link, for instance, or one might 
possibly have reason to show a snippet of HTML to see what went wrong.

A long URL in one long line is much easier to handle than the same URL broken
into two or more lines.  I find paragraphs with line length greater than my
screen width much more of a nuisance than one superlong line.  I think vi and
Emacs wrap long lines for viewing so everything is on the screen; actually I say
this from experience with vim 6, elvis 2.1.4 and Emacs.

When the recipient's viewer word-wraps and the sender's line length exceeds the
recipient's viewer width, the result is an awkward alternation of long and very
short lines.  If I know or am reasonably certain that the recipient's viewer
automatically word-wraps (Outlook Express, Eudora, Hotmail for instance), then
I am likely to send each paragraph as one superlong line, which I believe is the
best choice in this case.  But on an emailing list like this, the recipients are
likely to have many different viewers.