[ I asked Richard to describe his procedure which sets the preferences
 [ so that Outlook Express normally sends plain text.  -- Robbie

Hi Robbie,  Years ago, at your request, I set my default e-mail system
to "Plain text", and have used it thus ever since.  I am sending you
three test messages of different formats.  I had a hell of a time
finding an HTML format message in my machine; most of these are ads,
which I delete unread!

An interesting feature, if the plain text settings are made correctly:
when one replies to or forwards an HTML formatted message, the editable
'page' containing the 'new' forwarded or replied message to be sent,
automatically appears in plain text, so one can check that the
conversion happened.  By checking the properties box, I confirmed that
the 'converted' message is in fact true ASCII plain text, flagged as
ISO-8859-1 character set for handling Western European characters.

   * How to set "Outlook Express" to simple plain text *

1.  Display the main page of Outlook Express, the one that the program
opens with.  Most people have selected the page "Inbox" for this, but
any other page will work as well.

2.  Select "Tools" at the top of this page, _not_ from the
"Tools" selection that appears at the top of a message.

3.  Select "Options..." at the bottom of this pulldown menu.

4.  Select the second tab "Send"

5.  On the top third of this sheet, "Mail sending format",
click the dot "Plain Text".

6.  Nest to the "Plain text" dot, click the second square
called "Settings".

7.  On the sub-page that appears called "Plain text settings",
click the "MIME" dot.

8.  Below this dot, there is a pulldown menu called "Encode
text using:".  Select "None" here; do NOT select one of the
other options "Quoted printable" or "Base 64".

9.  Below this pulldown menu 'uncheck' the box called
"Allow 8-bit characters in headers"

10. Click "OK" to return to the "Send page".

11. On the "Send" page, uncheck the box called "Reply to messages using
the format in which they were sent"; otherwise all the above settings
would be ignored in case you were sending a reply or forwarded message
in some other format.

12. Now click "OK" on the "Send" page, and all your sent messages
should now be in compatible old fashioned 7-bit plain text.

Note 1:  Some users may wish to use other default format settings for
their own purposes.  This is okay providing that messages meant for
publication in MMD are individually changed to "Plain text".  This can
be done as follows:  On the new message itself, there is a small
toolbar at the top.  Select "Format" here, and click on "Plain text".
That individual message will be plain text, and will work okay
providing the "Plain text" settings have already been made as in step
7 and 8 above (one can select "MIME" and "None" in the plain text
dialog box even though you don't normally use plain text).

Note 2:  Even though the plain text format selected above favors
7-bit ASCII, it will send an 8-bit character to whoever can receive
them, if you put one in manually.  Since MMD has chosen not to use
8-bit ASCII for those whose servers are still stuck in the twentieth
century, don't use the Character Map or Alt-0xxx to make funny foreign
letters!  If you do, the message properties will automatically change
from "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit" to "Content-Transfer-Encoding:
8bit" without saying anything, and MMD will be unable to process the
message easily.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Richard Vance

 [ Thanks, Richard.  The MMD email processing program is still "stuck
 [ in the 20th century" and so I really appreciate good old "plain
 [ text", else I must make like a human threshing machine to "winnow
 [ the grain from the chaff."  -- Robbie