Future of the mailing lists

Meta
11

The issue was, too many posts with links to the same domain.

That’s a completely automated behavior (no human moderators flagged your messages). I have just overridden it and approved the posts.

hjh

12

excellent, thanks kindly - maybe if there’s an “allowed” list gitlab and github and perhaps any other obvious places could be added to it? - best, r

13

The text email source of @Peter’s reply prepends > to each line - so afaict the forum is interpreting this correctly? (e.g. > lines are quoted).

14

gitlab and github links are now whitelisted. Also, I made the “spam detection” for mass linking a little bit less sensitive. We’ve never really had problems with spam on the forum (probably we are way low traffic and esoteric to attract much), so I think this should be fine - and we can always adjust if we encounter problems in the future.

We’re running into a few of these issues for new users since we’re seeing an influx of people from the sc-users list joining, and the discourse has some protections that prevent someone from joining and immediately posting spam/big attachments/one word responses/etc as their first message. We can continue to adjust rules as needed.

15

Dear all,

Scott, your quote “The text email…” in your reply is sent between
lines of
quote=“muellmusik, post:9, topic:3736, full:true”
and
/quote
both in square brackets each, when read in mailing list mode and as
plain text email.

Apart from mail user agent’s not displaying this properly and without
syntax colorzing, it garbles the message.

Furthermore, is there any way to disable the lengthy email footer that
comes with each and every email? Imagine all forum posts having them
added…

thank you all for your help,
P

16

The markdown (square brackets) is part of my original post, so that’s why it’s probably in the plain text version. I guess it would be a nice discourse feature if it somehow transformed this particular markdown into something more like “plain text email” formatting, e.g. > - it’s probably worth submitting a discourse feature request for this.

The mail footer has (1) a perma-link to the original topic, (2) a legal notification about archiving replies, and (3) a sentence about why you’re receiving the email / how to unsubscribe.

(1) seems useful and I can imagine removing it would be quite confusing for navigating a long history of emails from the list. (2) is a legal requirement, (3) is good etiquette and probably a legal requirement in many places.

17

Dear Scott,

The markdown (square brackets) is part of my original post, so that’s why it’s probably in the plain text version. I guess it would be a nice discourse feature if it somehow transformed this particular markdown into something more like “plain text email” formatting, e.g. > - it’s probably worth submitting a discourse feature request for this.
I would rather think of this as a required feature not a feature for
technology that claims to be a drop-in replacement for mailing lists.

I am greatful for all your support and attempts to make mailing list
mode work, but feel that the situation as it is right now has many
disadvantages over the old list still.

The mail footer has (1) a perma-link to the original topic, (2) a legal notification about archiving replies, and (3) a sentence about why you’re receiving the email / how to unsubscribe.

(1) seems useful and I can imagine removing it would be quite confusing for navigating a long history of emails from the list. (2) is a legal requirement, (3) is good etiquette and probably a legal requirement in many places.
Understood. I think of 1 as being useless to me as I am reading postings
via email because I don’t want to visit an URL from a forum.
In which legislation is 2 required for each and every message? Couldn’t
this be handled at sign-up?

Thanks again for your help in making mailing list mode more accessible,
possibly also to visually impaired users.

Peter

Visit Topic Future of the mailing lists - #16 by scztt or
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18

Sorry you’re running into issues! I hope you can find a workflow that you’re happy with - the forum software is quite configurable, and I’m happy to make tweaks where possible, if they can improve the experience for list members, mailing list mode users or otherwise.

19

Hi,

Sorry you’re running into issues! I hope you can find a workflow that you’re happy with - the forum software is quite configurable, and I’m happy to make tweaks where possible, if they can improve the experience for list members, mailing list mode users or otherwise.
Test1

Test2

Reading my last posting as it is rendered on the forum I see that the
forum software gets quoting wrong. The first line of my replies got
included in the quoted text. I am testing this here with the two lines
above.

P

20

The forum interprets text as Markdown (specifically, following the common-mark specification). This should more or less match how the forum interprets markdown (including blockquotes): https://markdown-it.github.io/

Specifically: blockquotes are allowed to have single newlines, and only double-newlines signal that the block is over.

If you’re interacting with posts via plaintext mailing list mode, it’s good to know the basics of markdown because it ensures that your mails will be displayed in a reasonable way for all forum users - those using both plaintext and html emails, and those using the web interface (with all the associated details, e.g. css, screen readers, etc).

21

Scott,

are you saying that the mailing list mode does not understand email
replies with quotes unless they are formatted into markdown by the user
by hand?

thank you,
Peter

22

Forum post text is parsed for display purposes as markdown, regardless of whether it was entered on the web forum or in an email. The forum will accept any plain text content you send, of course, but if there’s markdown in it (e.g. > quotations) it will attempt to interpret it according to the common-mark spec.

commonmark.js demo is a good reference for the spec.

23

Is there a way to set mailing list mode to only send plain text emails? I prefer my mail diet in mutt, and the whole point of a mailing list mode is so that I wouldn’t have to deal with html…

1 Like
24

Yes, I have the same problems here. Mailing list mode is no real mailing
list mode in fact:

You can send and read emails from the forum in mutt (as I do), but be
aware that you will get lines of
quote=“muellmusik, post:9, topic:3736, full:true”
within the plain text when someone quoted someone, as described earlier in this
thread.
Furthermore the forum interprets inline quotes started with the
less-than sign as markdown instead of respecting RFC 3676. So quoting is
risky.

All these are PITA to plain text email readers and writers, as is the
missing threading of emails sent by the forum, i.e. most emails are not
replies to each other but as are mostly threaded in parallel as you
might have noticed yourself. Plus there are annoying footers at each and
every message.

And people are quoting less and less on the forum, so you will get more
out-of-context emails in your inbox as the context was quite clear to
the forum user who wrote it anyway, since (s)he saw it on the webpage
when replying.

25

The emails sent by mailing list mode have both html and plain text. If you prefer the plain text version, you’ll need to configure your email reader to display them as plain text.

26

Oh wow, I’d have to get mutt to recognize the emails from the mailing list and display them as plain text, while piping all other html emails through to w3m. Hmmm… interesting challenge. I don’t have the time to figure that one out right now, so I’d be happy if someone else has figured out how to do so.

27

In the case of Apple’s mail.app this isn’t possible anymore, alas.
For Thunderbird I’ve to check.
Thanks, Scott!

28

I posted this question on the neomutt mailing list, and received a fantastic response from a certain Eric Blake at Red Hat. I quote in full:

Absolutely!  Here's how I do it.  You're right that you need .mailcap
settings with a copiousoutput entry for text/html and any other format
you want neomutt to display inline; I have:

text/x-patch; cat; copiousoutput;
text/x-log; cat; copiousoutput;
text/x-diff; cat; copiousoutput;
text/html; firefox '%s' &; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; needsterminal;
text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -O UTF-8 -T %t -s -o display_link_number=1 \
 -dump; copiousoutput;
application/postscript; ps2ascii %s; copiousoutput
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; pandoc --from docx --to markdown %s; copiousoutput
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text; pandoc --from odt --to markdown %s; copiousoutput
application/pdf; pdftotext -layout %s -; copiousoutput;

(If you google, you can even find cases where people have utilized
image-to-ascii-art converters to view renderings of .jpg inline - but
that's going a bit beyond your question)

Then in my neomuttrc, I have rules that control which view I want to
see for a given message.  As written here, I default to reading the
text/plain (since I'm subscribed to more mailing lists where the plain
text is usually okay) and then bad-list the outliers, but you could
instead default to text/html and good-list the mailing lists.

message-hook . 'unalternative_order *; \
  alternative_order text/plain text text/enriched text/html'
message-hook '%f bad-multipart' \
  'unalternative_order *; alternative_order text/html multipart/related'
mime_lookup application/octet-stream
set mailcap_path = $my_mutt/mailcap
auto_view text/html text/x-patch text/x-log text/x-diff application/postscript\
 application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document\
 application/pdf

The key things to note: alternative_order is what controls which style
(text/plain or text/html) to prefer for a given email regardless of
the original order the sender used, auto_view is necessary to get
neomutt to open that portion of the messaege in your pager (assuming
it found a matching copiousoutput entry in mailcap), mime_lookup
catches a few more cases where you want auto_view to kick in, and
using message-hook then controls on a per-message basis which setting
of alternative_order I prefer (the '%f bad-multipart' hook lets me
utilize the group feature instead of having to write a lot of
duplicate hooks).

Then I have a BUNCH of lines like:

group -group bad-multipart -rx @.*cigna.com

to explicitly list the senders where I know that their text/plain
portion is broken.  And given that this is neomutt you could instead
have a separate file that contains a list of one regex per line (in my
case, I also allow # comments), and then in your neomuttrc do:

group -group bad-multipart `sed -n < path/to/sender_list '/#/d;H;${x;s/\n/ -rx /gp}'`

where the sed script appends every non-comment line with a preceding
newline into hold space, then on the last line of input, exchanges the
hold space back into pattern space, and converts those newlines into
'-rx' tokens, to give the requisite one-line output that neomutt then
executes as the desired:

group -group bad-multipart -rx line1 -rx line2 ...

And once you do that, a next cool hack is to write a macro that any
time you visit an email from an unknown sender, you type the macro
key(s) to trigger an automatic addition of that sender's email into
the current group definition as well as modifying your sender_list
file, so that future visits to mail from that sender will use the
preferred format.
1 Like
29

I’ve been trying a bit to get this to work on my system, but so far no success. When dissecting the email from the forum I only get an html mail, there is no plain text mail present at all. Maybe this is a problem with protonmail? I am using protonmail-bridge on linux, which may mess things up on my side, though… Needs a bit further investigation.

30

Both parts are definitely there, I wonder if Proton is somehow altering them? This is an excerpt of your previous message, as it was delivered to me:

----==_mimepart_60d8cc47a4a8e_28090ec712e2
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I've been trying a bit to get this to work on my system, but so far no success. When dissecting the email from the forum I _only_ get an html mail, there is no plain text mail present at all. Maybe this is a problem with protonmail? I am using protonmail-bridge on linux, which may mess things up on my side, though... Needs a bit further investigation.

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Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

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......

</body></html>
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