PE> The end user should never have to know what control lines are used
 PE> by the transport mechanism - to require them to do so is quite
 PE> obviously a sign of shoddy design.

i agree wholeheartedly...

 PE> Which is why it is distressing
 PE> to see the following comment from the author of MM707.ZIP, a
 PE> cooking program!  Some poor guy writes a program to deal with
 PE> cooking, and he finds that he has to learn about the FTS specs
 PE> in order to make his program "fido friendly"!  What a disgrace!

 PE>   "A new export format has been added which eliminates the
 PE>   hyphens in the header and footer; this provides compatibility
 PE>   with BBS systems that could not use hyphens."

 PE> I think we should all hang our heads in shame that we make authors
 PE> of recipe programs have to learn about mail standards because we
 PE> designed a system that is so shoddy that the poor guy can't even
 PE> transmit hyphens in peace.  SHEESH!

errrr... take your pick at the PROGRAMMERS you want "shot"
then... it's not the mail SYSTEM that has the problem but the programmers
that can't determine things correctly... how many times have you seen
something like this?

  ___----------
  this was under a line of all dashes

i have seen that crap TOOOOOO many times. it is directly a sign of a
programmer who doesn't want to take the time or space to code the tearline
stuff correctly. in fact, if they'd ignore the tearline completely, they
would NOT have this problem! how can you determine if a tearline is a
tearline or user entered text? answer: you can't!

)\/(ark