Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: punctuation at the coho-l

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Feb 15, 2015, at 10:01 AM, Jude Foster <foster.jude [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Someday I will learn to never use quote marks or apostrophes in posts to this 
> rather primitive cohousing-listserv
> Because it changes almost all (not all, mind you) of these punctuation marks 
> to ?s.

I don't see any ?s at all. 

One of the problems I am having with one of the lists I manage with 2500+ 
members and ~900  messages a month, is that the variety of email readers, free 
accounts, and security measures on the part of the hosts is mind boggling. I 
can no longer help people figure out what their problems are because it would 
be a full time job. I would have to set up my own accounts just like theirs on 
every service to learn all the combinations they might be using that are 
causing the problem.

It is usually their settings. Both gmail and yahoo have many settings that 
people are not aware of. A frequent complaint is not receiving copies of their 
own emails. That's a setting. You can just change it.

Another recent complaint is about the list not allowing html in messages. 
People want to be able to format messages with red headlines and 16 sizes of 
text, and 4 typefaces, etc. With 900 messages a month, all of which I read, the 
blur of ugly formatting would drive me to the optometrist and Prozac. THEN when 
the messages are replied to, they come out as several screens of HTML gibberish.

Another problem comes from writing messages in another program and pasting them 
into emails. Writing them in Word, for example, and pasting them in will cause 
all kinds of things depending on your version of Word and your settings. We 
have one poster who ends up with a * between every word. Very frustrating to 
read. We have found the problem -- pasting in from another program -- but he 
often forgets. 

This primitive list, if it is primitive, is fine with me. Email is about 
conversation. I often hit reply in order to read messages from newsletters, 
etc, in plain text.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org