Submission Format Guidelines

Contributors are encouraged to consider some format guidelines regarding submissions. These guidelines are meant both to help focus the list and to ease the duties of the moderator. They are in no way meant to discourage contribution.

• Submissions not in plain text with either an ASCII encoding or an ISO-8859-x encoding will be returned.
• Submissions that contain forward or response characters (such as a greater-than symbol preceding each line) will be returned if they are convoluted, at the discretion of the moderator. Such characters will not be removed prior to posting.
• Submissions that contain multipart MIME encoding will be returned if they are convoluted, at the discretion of the moderator. All MIME headers and trailers will be removed prior to posting.
• Submissions that contain non-text MIME encoding (such as attached graphics or application data) will be returned.
• Submissions that include extensive markup information (such as HTML) will be returned. Limited markup information may be overlooked, at the discretion of the moderator.
• Submissions that are not written in English will be returned, due to the international (and primarily English-speaking) audience of the list. Submissions that are written in other languages are welcome if the overall content is summarized by an English introduction, at the discretion of the moderator.
• Submissions should include as few extended characters as possible, since many email readers do not properly interpret such characters. If extended characters are present in a submission, please understand that they may be translated incorrectly during the posting process. In any case, emails containing incorrectly translated characters cannot be reposted.
• Submissions should be appropriately formatted with respect to content, mindful of the fact that many email readers support only fixed-width characters in eighty columns. In extreme cases, poorly formatted submissions will be returned.

Other guidelines can be found in the section on the Moderation of Contributions.

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