There has been a bit of confusion about what's going on with the LML recently and I figure it's about time I jump in and set some things straight... this is going to be a bit lengthy, but it is important, so please bear with me.

First off, a change of venue was announced to the LML last week, and I need to put this into perspective.  The old host for the LML was a small ISP in Fort Myers called OnLine Services, USA, or OLSUSA for short.  They sold their dial-up business to Earthlink at the beginning of April, and this put the future of the LML as we knew it in jeopardy.  I had been working on and off at setting up a mirror of the LML on servers provided by Rob Logan for quite some time, but as it was a low-priority item during that time, nothing official was ever done with it.  The pending change at OLSUSA, however, moved the relocation of the LML to new servers up to the front burner, and so Rob has been helping me tirelessly to get things up and running in a way we can all live with.

There are several benefits to having The List hosted on Rob's servers, not the least of which is the fact that he, as a Legacy builder, has a vested interest in seeing the LML continue as a resource for the Lancair community.  While I am quite proud of my online and computer-related abilities, I am still just a computer hobbyist, and am fortunate enough to know my limitations.  Rob, on the other hand, is a true professional in the field, and having him on tap to help with some of the more esoteric aspects of running the LML is a benefit that I am truly glad to have available.  We will all benefit greatly from his expanded presence in the day-to-day operations of the LML.

The listserver software that Rob has implemented on his system contains quite a few capabilities that were lacking at OLSUSA, and had I fully understood them earlier, I probably would have moved the LML over there months ago.  The web-based archives that were provided for the "old" LML were hosted on remote servers, and as such, were totally out of my control.  The web archive at lancaironline.net, OTOH, is local and can be maintained readily by both Rob and myself, meaning that we shouldn't be experiencing the outages we had with the old archive site.  Additionally, as soon as messages are approved for posting they appear on the new archive, and are not delayed as they had been in the past.  (The old web archive would sometimes take up to 3 or 4 days to get posts online, and that archive has been completely broken since late last year.)  The search capability is improved and will be appreciated once you compare its results to those you might have had with the old web archive.  (The text-based archives (Zipfiles for those of you who used them) are way out of date and I will endeavor to get them back in shape over the next few weeks.  The creation of each week's textfile is a manual operation, unrelated to the general operation of The List itself, and will take a bit of time, so thanks for your patience in this regard.)

The next thing is message formatting... this has opened a whole new can of worms for us, and I hope that the switches back and forth in the digests over the past week haven't caused too many of you anything other than minor inconveniences.  As you all know, one of the items that we constantly harped on at the "old" LML was that every post be submitted in plain text only.  This had little to do with the immediate (feed) mode subscribers, as most email programs have enough manners to display email messages in whatever format they arrive in.  The problem was, and still is, with the digest subscribers, and we're still fighting that battle, trying to come up with the format that we all can live with.  In a nutshell, here are the considerations...

Most purpose-built email programs (Eudora, Netscape Communicator, Pegasus, etc) are able to deal with whatever formatting an email can throw at it.  Plain text messages are displayed with whatever font is assigned by the user for plain text, multi-part messages are displayed according to the formatting included in the post, and pictures are either shown as part of the message or accessed through icons or links embedded in the email.  The same is true for digest users with these particular email programs, but that is not the case for users of Outlook or Outlook Express... and therein lies the rub.

I understand that there is a large segment of the LML population who uses Outlook to manage their email.  We have had lots of complaints from those folks when we sent the digests in an embedded-MIME format because Outlook didn't display the messages, but instead presented a series of icons that had to be clicked on one at a time to display each individual message in the digest.  I can see how this would be a complete PITA, and I don't blame you at all for being put off by it.  When we went to plain text digests, any photos that accompanied postings were decoded into hundreds of lines of garbage text, also a pain to deal with.  Accommodating Outlook users required us to send the digests in plain text, and as a result, the rest of the LML populace had to suffer once again with the lowest common denominator defined by that segment of the membership.  We've been trying to accommodate everyone by thinking the solution would be found "inside the box" that governed the way we'd been thinking about the LML all along.  However, I think we have a better solution, although it's going to require you all to consider some new possibilities, and perhaps use some capabilities of your email programs that have been heretofore untapped... time to think "outside the box" for a change...

You might have noticed that every post sent through the LML now includes the same bit of text at the beginning of each subject header, that being "[LML]".  We did this so all postings from the LML would be readily identifiable, to make segregating LML posts from all others a relatively easy task.  If those of you who are receiving the digests presently would turn on a filter in your email program that identified each LML posting by its [LML] "signature" in the subject line, you could use that filter to send all LML email to a separate LML mailbox... even Outlook and Outlook Express have that capability.  (You "feed" mode subscribers can also benefit from this idea, BTW.) We could then stop sending the digests entirely, put everyone in the feed mode, and you would control the location of all of your LML email locally.  You wouldn't have a "digest" per se, showing up in your regular email box every morning, instead you would have all of the LML postings residing in a separate email box, away from your usual email stream... thus segregating them, like a digest would, only in a slightly different fashion.  This would mean that we could allow MIME-encoded messaging, including the sending of photos, and you'd still be able to pick and choose the messages you read from within that dedicated mailbox.  I have done this with all of my inbound LML email, and it makes keeping track of it a very simple task indeed.  If you considered the additional possibilities as regard outbound email as well, it would be possible for you to keep everything LML related in that one box, all by using the filter function available in your email program.  Personally, I would prefer that we take this direction, as it does a couple of things for us immediately... the elimination of the plain-text requirement simplifies the moderation task considerably, as I currently have to sidetrack MIME-encoded posts and submit them on behalf of the sender... this tends to slow things down a bit.  More importantly, it takes the responsibility for getting pictures out on the website out of my hands, and makes them instantly available at the archive.  This is a real benefit for everyone, as we frequently have photos that folks want to share, and getting them online presently is subject to the vagaries of my personal schedule... and you all know what kind of delays that can cause.  Identifying the posts with photos in the archive is a simple matter, as the size of each posting is included in the index.  If you see a message larger than 2 or 3kb it obviously has a photo attached to it.  (Stop by the archive and look at the few posts with message sizes in multiple KBs... you'll be impressed with what you see.)  I will ultimately copy the photos to the "Attachments" area of the website, but in the meantime, they would still be available for viewing.

The second alternative, if you're using Outlook or Outlook Express, _and_ we keep the digest going, would be to switch to the index mode... this way you wouldn't receive any of the complete posts, just an index in lieu of the daily digests... once you receive the index you just follow the link in the post to the web archive and access the postings online.  I'm not very fond of this alternative, as I really prefer keeping the LML totally email-based, and this would entail further online time and make the LML a sort of hybrid beast for those of you who chose the index mode of delivery.  Switching from mode to mode is a relatively simple task... to switch from digest to index you would send a blank message to the list addressed to lml-index@lancaironline.net.  A complete description of the process is on the web at http://lancaironline.net/lists/.

As you can see, I'm trying desperately to veer us off of the plain-text path we have been following for the last 4 years, as we now have some capabilities that we all can benefit from.  It is counter-productive for us to bury our heads in the sand and deny the fact that today's computers are faster, both storage space and bandwidth is cheaper, our email programs (by and large) have untapped abilities that we need to take advantage of, and that it is about time we took the bull by the horns and started using these capabilities to our own advantage.  We are all somewhat resistant to change, but as a community, _we_ members of the LML are probably better equipped mentally to deal with it than 98% of the population out there, otherwise we wouldn't be building experimental airplanes now, would we?

If any of you have a problem with managing your LML emails in the feed mode via the filter method I've outlined above, please let me know why, and perhaps I'll be able to help you find a way to make this a reality.  I'm voting for the replacement of the digests with a better way for _everyone_ to deal with immediate (feed) mode postings and, ultimately, improve the overall quality of the LML as an online resource for all of us.  Please send your comments and questions to me at marvkaye@lancaironline.net.  I won't make any further changes for now and will let you know what's happening in the next few days.

  <Marv>