On 10/13/2015 06:42 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

but AOL users say that they get a single block of text with no paragraphs. I'm not sure if that means that it just lacks the blank lines between paragraphs, or if it means that the entire post is converted to a single paragraph.

Friends don't let friends use AOL (or Yahoo).

OK, that's only a little bit facetious, but there is apparently an AOL formatting issue here. Using Thunderbird, I sent your post to an AOL account. Your original looked good as I received it from the mailman-users list. What I sent looked good in my sent folder. It also looked good in my Thunderbird inbox for my AOL account (IMAP).

When I looked at it in AOL's web client, it was garbled. The 'paragraph' structure with blank lines was there, but the paragraphs were rewrapped strangely. E.g your paragraph

but AOL users say that they get a single block of text with no paragraphs. I'm not sure if that means that it just lacks the blank lines between paragraphs, or if it means that the entire post is converted to a single paragraph.

renders in AOL's client as

but AOL users say that they get a single block of text with no paragraphs. I'm not sure if that means that it just lacks the blank lines between paragraphs, or if it means that the entire post is converted to a single paragraph.

So, I don't see exactly what your users report, but I do see anomalous rendering.

Bottom line is this is an AOL issue. Possibly sending without the hard returns except at paragraph breaks would help. I just tried that, and it's better, but there are still extraneous line breaks after 'but' in the above paragraph and after 'Has anyone' in the subsequent paragraph.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan