[Tagging] [OSM-talk-be] mailing list good practice (user's and software's)

[André Pirard]

On 2013-09-16 11:52, Glenn Plas wrote :
> If you want to be serious about this then a new topic should be
> initiated by sending a new mail instead of a reply with a new
> subject.  Every decent mailclient out there -usually- does not use the
> subject to 'thread' mails. instead it uses certain fields in the mail
> headers.  I noticed that mail-man (the mailing list handler of THIS
> list) does not seem to add those headers (in fact, they seem to be
> removed from outgoing mails, I cannot find those fields like below).
You're right, my main gripe is against the mailing list software mailman
itself because it does not allow HTML. It does archive a HTML version of
the archive but when you look at it on the server you see HTML code.
By "allow HTML", I mean "simple HTML": text style, lists, tables etc,
not eccentric showy stuff.
I've sent an e-mail to mailman about this and they replied

  * that we, technical people, do not need HTML because we don't use it
    much.
    They obviously did not look at, for example,
      o the OSM Web pages
        <http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/52411> in which
        the tags and other data are in tables that we can copy&paste to
        an e-mail,
      o nor at the plentiful number of links in Wiki Web pages
        <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features> or other
        references: decency requests to use them in e-mail too so that
        the reader finds the information with a click instead of a
        Google search
      o nor simply this way to make a long phrase understandable
  * that the mailman's *default configuration* screens out the HTML for
    security reasons
    This is weird, because,
      o if I'm not mistaken, the recipients receive the full HTML
        message anyway, only the archive is screened out and there's a
        second full HTML copy that the obstinate user can manage to
        display anyway
      o as said above, only dangerous HTML needs to be filtered out and
        there must be code out there to plug in to do the filtering so
        that the simple, innocuous HTML remains

Because of all that, what I have personally done is subscribing a Google
account to all my mailing lists and using filters on it to archive each
mailing list into its own respective folder. When I need to search my
archives, I simply open the wanted folder in IMAP
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol> mode
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol> with
Thunderbird <http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/>.  Should I need to
reply, I, well, click Reply, which I don't know how to do with mailman.

I wish mailman were doing that filtering and IMAP service!
I would have shared my folders with you if Google had allowed
passwordless R/O access to them.

Now, more closely related to threading, Thunderbird must be an extra
decent program: it can display by subject *or* by thread.  Does it use a
special algorithm?  In a quick overview, I can't find a hitch in the
threading in OSM-talk-be. That is, not a message with a subject
different that the thread it's in.

Cheers,

André.


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