How to Create Beautiful Plain Text Emails
(and Avoid =20 Disease)
What's the Problem?
People who are used to the newer email clients that automatically create
HTML or rich text messages sometimes have problems sending clean posts
to FORKNI-L and FKFIC-L. The features that make your mail look so
attractive and expressive—different fonts, colors, and styles—can
create a nightmare of unintended symbols appearing in your posted
emails.
This happens because the PSU list server can only process plain text
characters. When it runs across a special character (for instance, curly
quotes instead of straight quotes)…
“curly quotes” vs. "straight
quotes"
…it substitutes a plain text code. When this happens, your email
shows up with strange notations like "=20" sprinkled all
through it, making your post very difficult to read.
How Do You Avoid This?
There are a number of ways you can avoid =20 disease:
- Turn off all HTML/rich text formatting in your email client
- Write your story in a word processor and save the file as text
with line breaks
- Write your story in a text editor
The most surefire way to avoid =20 disease is to write your story
in a text editor. A text editor never uses special characters or
formatting, so you'll never have a problem with weird characters in your
list posts.
There are many text editors available for you to use. The most common
one is Notepad, which ships with all Microsoft operating systems. You'll
find it under Accessories in your Start menu.
There are also shareware text editors that have more features than
Notepad has, such as search-and-replace and spell checking. One
easy-to-use text editor I recommend is UltraEdit, available for free
through www.shareware.com.
A couple of the features I like that many text editors have are line
and column numbering. With line numbering turned on, you can tell
exactly how long your post is, and whether or not you have to divide it
into sections to meet the 300 line maximum allowed by FKFIC-L. With
column numbering, you can specify how long your lines of text are. The
best length is from 60 to 70 characters. If you set the line length to
no more than 70 characters, your posts will not show up with alternating
long-short-long lines.
In Summary
To ensure you send a nice, clean post to the FK mailing lists:
- Use a text editor to write your story.
- Make sure your post is at the most 300 lines long. When you add in
the headers that are added in the emailing process, I find that
cutting a story at 275 lines avoids possible rejections by the
server.
- Make sure your line lengths are no more than 70 characters. Set
your editor to add a hard carriage return at the end of each line
for the best results in posting.
- To finish your plain text polished look, separate your paragraphs
with a hard carriage return or indent the first line of a new
paragraph with 3 to 5 spaces.
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