OT; Advertising

I had an email from one Edward Davey MP telling me about all the flooding countermeasures that wer in place in his constituancy, where I live. All the way through the piece the words affect and effect were used incorrectly. Does nobody check these things?

Brian

Nope.

He looks the type to have unpaid interns, too

Whilst my grammar might not be perfect, I consider in reasonable - and I have a spell checker.

The e-mail had the following errors;

Pentangon (it's Pentagon). chatham (Chatham). hhigh footfal directiry pentangon awear pentongon limted companys baords companys bussiness

Do I want to advertise with someone who can't spell & has no grasp of English? Tough call.

I guess they know your advert will be read by the local chavs and school dropouts, so are letting you know your ad doesn?t have to be grammatically correct, as none of the people who read it would notice.

Maybe something along the lines of:

Attention all mouth breathers, crack heads, scratters, tards and Jeremy Kyle/Trisha fans,

Are you too dumb to work out how to open a plug to change a fuse, Not sure which way round to hold a screwdriver, Think assembling an Ikea Billy bookcase is akin to building a space shuttle, Don?t know which way to turn the stop c*ck when your house is flooding from a burst pipe, Think you need a part P certificate to change a light bulb, Think DIY is what you do when the missus won?t let you on the nest?

Then call the Medway Handy Man out, He can fix what you are too thick to understand because he didn?t leave school at 14, after 5 years of playing truant.

Infinitely more worrying is that they have been checked! :)

A certain irony in a post complaining about poor formatting.

Are you assuming that they would know the difference if they *did* check?

If you can supply "camera ready" copy, then it ought not matter.

The post was about grammar & spelling. I don't have the faintest idea what "a multi-part message in MIME format" is. Nor do I care & I suspect nobody else does either.

Maybe the agent will 'correct' it for you for free :)

NT

I know and care ;-)

OK, I'll bite :-)

What is it & why do you care?

AKA "PDF" perchance?

Jim K

As does anyone who matters.

Mr Skitt would like to point at "in".

Adny :)

I concur with Huge, please can you post in plain text?

Go into "options" then (perversely) "mail" like this:

Then do this:

Better still, dump Windows Live Mail, and use Thunderbird or Free Agent.

ITYF it's just "Skitt" (no Mr). :-)

MIME is Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions - its a bunch of standards that were developed to allow non text content to be included in email (which was primarily a system designed to carry 7 bit ASCII and nothing else). It also works in many "email like" systems such as usenet

- some of the time.

In many respects email has gone downhill ever since!

It allowed embedded advertising, embedded web page style content, security vulnerabilities, pointless graphics etc to infest what was an simple yet effective system. It also caused average message sizes to bloat enormously. Needless to say, advertisers loved it.

Some might argue MS were partly to blame for building it into Outlook Express (the non techie users email client of choice for many years) and at a stroke levering all the potential problems to afflict their Internet Explorer rendering platform, into email such that they could then affect that as well.

As to why I care; with text only groups like this, there really ought not be any included "binary" (i.e. MIME) content in the messages. That means as readers we get to choose how to configure our software to render messages in fonts of out choice, and colour etc to suit our preferences. However along comes a message in multipart/MIME format with a plain test version and a MIME version, and you can suddenly find you are reading the senders preference for font etc rather than your own for that message, because your software has decided to it "understands mime" and will now set about rendering it for you. Alternatively, as you found, it just treats it as a plain test message and you are now staring at all the MIME message baggage making the actual content difficult to find.

Lastly because MIME is the mechanism by which attachments are added to messages, you also run the problem that text only news servers will drop those messages from text groups - hence messing up the threading for some readers.

I do use Thunderbird.

Ironically, with the Berlin server and Thunderbird, that post was fine - simply it was formatted in a different-to-usual font. But I agree with you through and through.