Kevin O's posting problem

David Bowman (dbowman@tiger.georgetowncollege.edu)
Sat, 31 Oct 1998 20:25:38 EST

Concerning Kevin's posting problem:

>Yes, well, people usually blame my email service when this kind of thing
>happens, but I don't have this problem posting to other listserv systems,
>and for the other problems, as you point out only a few people experience
>them. The sounds more like a problem with their email systems and the
>Calvin computer system.

I suspect that the problem that Kevin has posting to the reflector is due
to a bad interaction between the idiosyncrasies of *both* his email
program *and* the majordomo software at Calvin. I don't know if Kevin
knows it or not but his posts have been posted with some inordinately long
line lengths. It looks like Kevin has composed his posts using a
formatting word processor and then had the composition converted to
straight ASCII text. When this happens each paragraph of Kevin's post is
converted to a single ASCII line. It is only at the paragraph breaks that
his hard returns were translated to normal line terminations. My
suspicion is that his posts that were split were because those posts had
some long paragraphs and the resulting single line was longer than
Calvin's majordomo software could handle. Maybe his incoming posts to the
reflector overflowed a default maximum line length setting or something.

My suggestion to Kevin would be to make sure that your posts have hard
returns terminating *each* nominal line (at at most the 73rd column or
so rather than just at the paragraph breaks). My guess is that this will
cure the problem.

David Bowman
dbowman@georgetowncollege.edu