a.u.o intro: QWK and crayons

using QWK for Internet mail or Usenet is like using wax crayons for all
your business correspondence.  it'll get your message across, but only
to those people who don't throw it away without opening it.

this is because QWK has small limits on certain essential headers,
and does not allow certain other essential ones.  some QWK packers
try to compensate by recreating the headers and removing the truncated
data, but such efforts are prone to failure.

of course, some formerly-QWK packages also can ignore the truncated
headers and use full headers in the body of the text -- which they
correctly manipulate, just like any other correct newsreader.  it's
nice that these authors have started to catch up to the rest of the
crowd.  but since this can be done only by ignoring the QWK headers,
they can not be seriously referred to as QWK messages anymore.