Re: st: html format postings to Statalist

[Phil Schumm <pschumm@uchicago.edu>]

On Aug 23, 2007, at 12:39 PM, Schaffer, Mark E wrote:
> I have a question for you - how did you manage to send an email to  
> Statalist in html format?  According to the FAQ,
>
> http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/statalist.html#advice
>
> it shouldn't have gone through.

Although we don't use Majordomo (the software used to host  
Statalist), we do maintain a large number of research-oriented  
mailing lists, and, like Statalist, we too have a strict policy of no  
HTML-formatted email.  In our case, we use a script to identify HTML- 
formatted messages and to strip out the HTML tags, leaving the raw  
text in place.  Part of this process obviously involves detecting  
when a message contains HTML, and that is not a perfect process,  
since the HTML sent by mailers can often be pretty ugly (this is one  
of the reasons for disallowing HTML-formatted posts).  IOW, whenever  
attempting to detect HMLT-formatted email programmatically, both  
false positives and false negatives are possible.  I have no idea  
whether that is the answer in this case.

At any rate, as Nick pointed out, knowingly attempting to send HTML- 
formatted email to a list when it is against list policy is unlikely  
to ingratiate you to its readers.


-- Phil

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