pa0r

O.k., I will admit it. I lost quite some time today because of  a well-known problem I should have recognized.

The thing is, I am doing my regular email via PSKmail, and one of the messages I wanted to post to digitalradio@yahoogroups.com just would not get through to the server, whatever I did...  It was only a small message, but it just stuck there and repeated the same sentences every time. The server seemed completely deaf for it.

After trying 6 times (I am that type of person, just don't give up easily) I wrote a 2k test message and tried that. It went through like honey through a well oiled esophagus (if you know what that is).

'Look at the file', there must be something in the file. So I looked at the file with gedit, with joe and with bvi. Nothing alarming in there. Tried to upload the message again.... failure. Then, I looked at the file with less, and BINGO. There they were, 2 ^M characters. 0x0D is the so-called carriage return, a relict from old times when letters were hammered into a piece of paper with a mechanical device with steel objects. The paper would be fixed to a carriage, which was pulled forward with a spring, and you would make it return by pulling it back by hand.

I had forgotten that I had copied the text of the message from a MS$ windows machine at the trailer park's registration office (I use webmail at least once a week to read newsgroups that have a lot of uninteresting traffic, and to release mails that hang in the spam filter) , which still resembles that good old typewriter. (Interesting to note that a typewriter those days cost about the same as Micro$oft XP now, but they lacked a blue screen and the user support was free of charge).

In will have to filter these fossils from the messages before they can do their damage. 

I just wanted to warn you. Beware of the typewriter, it still haunts us!!