🚀 go-pugleaf

Congratulations on getting AMS installed to the point where this is even
an issue!

About the $forceformat and global AMS-aliases thing.

No, there's no current provision for a global .AMS_aliases file, or for
any other global (per-recipient) information about whether a recipient
is interested in accepting ATK-formatted messages.  It's not a bad idea,
though; certainly it's not a bad idea to have a centrally-located file
describing the formatting preferences of addresses within a community. 
(Now, you could do it by having a global name that was always checked,
or building an ``include'' file mechanism into the .AMS_aliases reader. 
If the former were done, so that all users always used the contents of
the globally-named file, I'd recommend against using it to define name
aliases, in favor of using it only for global $forceXXX information. 
There's already a /usr/lib/aliases to handle name aliases, and that's
what sendmail will use, as well.)

There are other problems with your current approach--for instance, if
you send mail to two recipients, one of whom is listed as format-OK and
one not listed (and thus in format-not-OK mode), the sender still has to
decide whether both recipients get a formatted version or both get
non-formatted mail.

Did you know that if you use CUI or VUI to read mail, that formatting in
messages is stripped out before the mail is displayed?  You might
experiment with setting AMS_UsersHandleFormatting to ``yes,'' and
letting users use CUI or VUI to de-format messages before showing them
on screens (or printing terminals, for that matter).  Admittedly, CUI
and VUI are kinda clumsy, and MH doesn't know a thing about
ATK-formatted messages.  Maybe it won't matter.

There is some MH-compatibility stuff in AMS (the message server library)
that was just getting a bit of polish last November.  It allows AMS to
use something of a native-MH set of messages, but it was originally
designed more for public folders than for personal mail folders.  I'm
sure that Nathaniel will chime in here.  Back to you, Nathaniel.  (Cut
here.)

		Craig Everhart