[Mailman-Users] Formatting problems with AOL subscribers

[Mark Sapiro]

On 10/13/2015 06:42 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 
> but AOL users say that they get a single block of text with no 
> paragraphs. I'm not sure if that means that it just lacks the blank 
> lines between paragraphs, or if it means that the entire post is 
> converted to a single paragraph.


Friends don't let friends use AOL (or Yahoo).

OK, that's only a little bit facetious, but there is apparently an AOL
formatting issue here. Using Thunderbird, I sent your post to an AOL
account. Your original looked good as I received it from the
mailman-users list. What I sent looked good in my sent folder. It also
looked good in my Thunderbird inbox for my AOL account (IMAP).

When I looked at it in AOL's web client, it was garbled. The 'paragraph'
structure with blank lines was there, but the paragraphs were rewrapped
strangely. E.g your paragraph

> but AOL users say that they get a single block of text with no
> paragraphs. I'm not sure if that means that it just lacks the blank
> lines between paragraphs, or if it means that the entire post is
> converted to a single paragraph.

renders in AOL's client as

> but
> AOL users say that they get a single block of text with no
> paragraphs. I'm not
> sure if that means that it just lacks the blank
> lines between paragraphs, or if
> it means that the entire post is
> converted to a single paragraph.

So, I don't see exactly what your users report, but I do see anomalous
rendering.

Bottom line is this is an AOL issue. Possibly sending without the hard
returns except at paragraph breaks would help. I just tried that, and
it's better, but there are still extraneous line breaks after 'but' in
the above paragraph and after 'Has anyone' in the subsequent paragraph.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan