[Mailman-Users] AOL format frustration

[Jon Carnes]

IMO, your best bet is to store the message on a webserver in it's pretty
HTML format then send out a teaser message in a nice text format and
include a link to the html formated page on your website.

That way you have a nice archive of your messages and everyone can see
your wonderful formating equally.  Also, you get a nice log of anyone
who reads your message and when.

Take care - Jon Carnes

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 13:49, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On Jan 4, 2004, at 9:55 AM, Steve Roitstein wrote:
> 
> > I write the messages in the mail program the comes with my mac. I 
> > sometimes send out a small jpg attachment but mostly it's text with a 
> > bit of color added to a few words.
> >
> > Subscribers who are on AOL get the message in a different text, no 
> > line breaks, no returns, nothing. Just all text in a huge paragraph, 
> > no formatting. Needless to say, these messages are very hard to read 
> > and unappealing.
> >
> 
> are these primarily Mac users? welcome to AOL hell.
> 
> Mac users prior to Jaguar 10.2 or who haven't updated their software 
> are on AOL code base 5, which doesn't understand HTML e-mail. Instead, 
> they get the text-only version your mail client creates if you're 
> sending out formatted/html email.
> 
> If you're not sending the e-mail out as HTML, but instead in some form 
> of styled text, that's also a problem, becaues the styled stuff is 
> stripped out by AOL. what format is the e-mail in? html? rtf?
> 
> In any event, you don't have a whole lot of options. The best way to 
> deal with this is to send a multi-part HTML/text where you craft each 
> piece separately and not have the mail client do it for you. If you're 
> really interested in making it look good on AOL, a tri-part adding in 
> an text/x-aol (which is a hybrid text with a few htmlish things in it).
> 
> but all fo this requires some custom sending tools, you can't build 
> this stuff with a standard e-mail client. if you want to stick to 
> writing and sending via a client, you're going to had issues with AOL, 
> especially if you're mailing to users of older versions of AOL. it's a 
> real pain in the butt, without a lot of easy answers. But if you 
> aren't, writing your e-mail in HTML is your first step.
> 
> 
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