Who is Steward and what can he do for me?

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <199704140347.DAA14951 at out1.ibm.net>, on 04/13/97 
   at 11:37 PM, "Jon A. Lambert" <jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com> said:

>I have been reading these interesting comments about this guy Steward
>and how he's gonna take over the list and was wondering if he'll make
>a formal introduction here?  :-P

The last assault is underway.  Unfortunately it requires me to engage
in single combat with the dread enemy champion Sendmail and his minion
macros.  I was hoping to get it up and running this weekend, but
didn't quite make it.  Them sendmail control files can be a doozey. 
Next weekend looks *really* good.

>Does Steward like HTML and/or does he support full-fledged Mime or
>RichText?  Or File Attachments?  In other words, can I imbed pretty 
>pictures, flow charts, and Dilbert cartoons into my posts to irritate 
>the HTML impaired?   Can I embed bold/italics/underline fonts to 
>enhance and confuse readers of my posts?

Multi-part MIME will (unsurprisingly) continue to not be supported. 
Technically the rest is supported.

As listadmin however I also have a say here:

  I don't like HTML mail.  I don't want to see it here.

  Brief embedded HTML ala URLs, mailto: tags etc and other 
  external references are Okay.

  File attachments, if small and highly relevant like the recent 
  quadtree image, are not only Okay by me, but encouraged.

  MIME font work will have to be awfully damned good for me to jump 
  on it.  You are free to take this as a challenge.

Guiding principle: lowest common denominator.  Your mail should be
readable on a vt100.  Having the support images is fine -- but keep
the discussion in the text.

>I understand this might be bad form in most of the NGs, but in all 
>seriousness would it be advantageous to present technical  concepts
>along with event diagrams, STDs, object diagrams? Is there a
>preferred acceptable format for this? (.gif, .jpg, etc.) Will Steward
>have capacity to support this sort of thing? Or more importantly,
>will you or your mailboxes object to this blatant spamming?

I currently have a technical limit of 3Meg on my inbound mailbox which
is shared with this list, a couple others, and my own personal email
(will be changing, but not yet).  While I typically poll 2 - 3 times a
day, a single message larger than 3Meg (or which overflows the
mailbox) will get bounced before it even gets to me.   This last is
easy to do with MIME attachments.  If you want a rough calculator you
can safely figure that any MIME/base64 encoded attachment will be
three times larger than its binary size.

Translation:  If its an image, make it a JPEG.  Compress everything
else with a standard archiver (ie I don't care which).  Keep them
small.  Links to external sites (ie embedded HTML link to image on web
page) are better.  Fill my mailbox with a MIME attachments and I won't
be pleased.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...