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
- Scott Carver via scsynth noreply@m.scsynth.org [2021-06-17 12:40]:
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.
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
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.
- kflak via scsynth noreply@m.scsynth.org [2021-06-25 14:58]:
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.
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.
In the case of Apple’s mail.app this isn’t possible anymore, alas.
For Thunderbird I’ve to check.
Thanks, Scott!
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
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.
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.
---
[Visit Topic](https://scsynth.org/t/future-of-the-mailing-lists/3736/29) or reply to this email to respond. Email replies to this address may be posted publicly and archived on scsynth.org ([privacy policy](https://scsynth.org/privacy)).
You are receiving this because you enabled mailing list mode. To unsubscribe from these emails, [click here](https://scsynth.org/email/unsubscribe/4d6d05d0a76b22623d527b6e045ba75f19e75a58b8233df5e0c1fe008eb7b0d9).
----==_mimepart_60d8cc47a4a8e_28090ec712e2
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<!DOCTYPE html><html xmlns=3D"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang=3D"en" xml=
:lang=3D"en"><head>
<meta http-equiv=3D"Content-type" name=3D"viewport" content=3D"initial-=
scale=3D1.0, maximum-scale=3D1.0, user-scalable=3Dno, width=3Ddevice-width"=
>
<!-- prevent ios zooming + autoscaling -->
<meta name=3D"x-apple-disable-message-reformatting">
<title></title>
</head>
<body style=3D"line-height: 1.4; text-align:left;" dir=3D"ltr">
......
</body></html>
----==_mimepart_60d8cc47a4a8e_28090ec712e2--
Most probably protonmail is doing something shifty with the mails, then… More to investigate! However, it would be really good to have an option in the forum settings to be able to set this at source instead. (And of course, a good default value would be plain text ;-)) Is there a way to make this a feature request somewhere?
Hello,
As this thread deals with email formatting…
Currently the code blocks in the email have double newline characters (IIUC). Is it possible to change that, i.e. remove extraneous newlines in code blocks?
I’d also be in favor of removing or shortening the extensive (and IMO visually too prominent) footers.
Marcin
Yes! Here’s a guide to making feature requests for Discourse. We update pretty often, so as soon as gets in the official builds, we’ll have it on the forum shortly after. Discourse is both open source and supports plugins, so we can also build features ourselves and submit.
A filed a bug on the newline issue:
The current email footer is two lines:
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I’m, not sure the first line can’t really be edited any further without making it incoherent?
The second line could be shortened to JUST an unsubscribe link? Or maybe unsubscribe + email preferences?
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Does this seem like a worthwhile change?
Thanks @scztt !
A filed a bug on the newline issue:
Thanks!
I’m, not sure the first line can’t really be edited any further without making it incoherent? (…)
Does this seem like a worthwhile change?
Sorry, I should’ve been more clear.
That text-only header is fine, and the proposed change would be also good (as I assume you’d like to leave the privacy note in). However, the HTML version has “Visit Topic” as a quite prominent button… The text version for that link (even in HTML mode) would be so much nicer IMO, as the graphic adds visual noise. Also, in some replies, Visit Topic is displayed twice (under the actual message, and under “In Reply To”).
What also bothers me visually is that (at least for some emails?) the bottom of the email shows “In Reply To” with person’s name, avatar, and an excerpt of the original message, which is not quoted, e.g.:
miczac miczac
June 25
In the case of Apple’s mail.app this isn’t possible anymore, alas.
For Thunderbird I’ve to check.
Thanks, Scott!
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In Reply To
scztt scztt
June 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.
Visit Topic or reply to this email to respond. Email replies to this address may be posted publicly and archived on scsynth.org (privacy policy).
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Especially the avatar adds to visual noise IMO.
Do I understand correctly that I’d need to configure my email client to apply a filter to messages from the forum to get text-only (non-html) messages? That does seem like some burden to the user (i.e. it would be good to be able to choose format in the preferences, which is an option I don’t see there).
Also, IIUC some things look better (i.e. there’s no “In Reply To” avatar) if the response is posted from the web (like my previous message), vs sent via email (this message).
…and email replies are being posted back to everyone, including the original author. Pasting an image to show how this looks in gmail:
As mentioned above, I also experienced that mailing list mode emails are too cluttered by images, rich text formatting and redundant information. It’s also difficult to write inline replies or guess how the formatting will be. It would be better if emails were just plain text markdown or alike.
I would definitely add a feature request to Discourse to enable a “text-only” preference. Discourse is encoding both in the email which is pretty standard - probably to allow for reading emails from multiple mail reader endpoints, which may or may not support rich text.
The visit topic button has been discussed endlessly: First link in post footer - very distracting - #2 by codinghorror - ux - Discourse Meta
I don’t like it either. We can style the messages - if anyone can come up with some CSS that will remove the box, I’d be glad to add it to our email template.
Likewise, if anyone wants to propose a CSS snippet that will de-emphasize the avatar icons, please do and we can consider adding it.
Dear Lucas,
emails from the forum software can be read as plain text emails,
depending on the settings of your mail client. This is what I and some
others use.
Needless to say that included images etc. are not rendered. Most posters
are not aware of this, they think they are sending their stuff to an
html forum.
This is another reason why a hybrid forum-email mode will never really work like
a mailing list software. It tempts people to omit proper quoting, and
to include binary attachments, such as images, which are using up more
space, cannot be searched for contents, are unreadable to visually
impaired. Please all, stop sending images, screenshots, whatever. Please
place an according message on the forum.
Plaintext emails should not require markdown formatting, but should be
interpreted correctly using standard email quoting as stated earlier in
this thread. There is no sense in having to manually reformat emails, which work
nice on all other mailing lists, before sending them.
best, Peter
- lucas via scsynth noreply@m.scsynth.org [2021-06-30 02:25]: