Please post plain text only

[Mark Bahlke <mbahlke@pcocd2.intel.com>]

The EV List Charter only allows plain text to be POSTed.

Please make sure your email program is set to PLAIN TEXT.
html or any other mode is not acceptable
(it reads like garbage to everyone else).

Here are a few reasons for this:

1. Attached files and HTML vastly increase the size of emails, and for
the most part, provide nothing of value in return.

2. Some of us (me, for example :-) get access via a dial-up modem. Data
rates are often very slow. My 56k modem has never connected at 56k baud;
the fastest I have ever seen is 28.8k (in the middle of the night).
During late afternoon and evening data rates are as slow as 7200 baud.

3. Some people pay for connect time by the hour. This is especially true
in rural or outlying areas, where resoruces are very limited. Huge files
cost more to download. 

4. People read the EV list all over the world, with 100's of different
types of computer systems. New, old, PCs, Macs, Unix boxes, and heaven
knows what else. They all support ASCII. But if you use a specialized or
proprietary format (Microsoft Word, MIME, HTML, Javascript, etc. then a
fairly substantial number of these systems either cannot view your
message, or it gets mangled so badly that the recipient won't bother to
try to read it.

5. Many people receive the EV list in digest form (one file per day
instead of 50). If everyone used some high level format, the digests
would be monsterous -- beyond the maximum file size limits of many email
systems.

6. The EV list gets archived. You can download a month's worth of emails
as one big file. If the archived files are full of dozens of different
formatted messages, essentially no email program can make any sense out
of the resultant mess.

7. Most alternate email formats are part of the marketing wars of
various software giants. If you use the latest-and-greatest Microsoft
product, its default settings send emails in a format only other
latest-and-greatest Microsoft products can receive, thus "forcing"
anyone you correspond with to buy their products. The EV list is
supposed to be INclusive, not EXclusive.

8. Standards keep changing. If you allow all formats, and they keep
changing over time, 5 or 10 years from now nothing will be able to read
any of the files you may have saved from earlier EV list postings.

9. Email viruses spread largely via attachments. Banning them
effectively keeps them from spreading and infecting other people's
computers.

10. Lastly, this is the accepted method as determined by an extensive poll
of the list membership.  Until it is determined that list protocols and
procedures need changing, this will be S.O.P.  As with all accepted
procdures, persons not cooperating with this standard will be warned and/or
dropped from the list.

Remember, this is a voluteer operated list, and we only have time to do
so much.  To get the most value from this list, we all need to "get along".