[Mailman-Developers] GSoC 2014 : Proposal for the Mailman CLI project

[Mark Sapiro]

On 04/27/2014 08:03 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 
> Unfortunately I don't have a copy of your original, but what may be
> happening is not at GMail, but rather that the mailing list tries
> pretty hard to avoid HTML mail, throwing away the text/html part if
> there's a text/plain alternative, and otherwise running it through an
> HTML-to-text converter (probably Lynx with output to a file).
> 
> It could also just be my local MUA, which I have set up to try to
> minimize the HTML mail that I see.
> 
> Mark can probably say with some confidence.


This list's content filtering removes all text/html parts from list posts.

This, combined with the fact that web based MUAs such as Gmail and Yahoo
typically default to 'rich text' composition and allow things like bold,
underline and italic, can create issues.

When you send such an email, the MUA typically creates a
multipart/alternative message with text/plain and text/html
alternatives. The text/html alternative will generally render very much
like what you saw in the composition window, at least in MUAs that
understand MIME and render HTML. The text/plain alternative is more
problematic. Yahoo's is frankly terrible, at least if you view the raw
text. Gmail's is better, but it uses the more or less standard star,
underscore and slash convention for *bold*, _underlined_ and /italic/ text.

On most (ed. comment - intelligent) discussion lists, you will only
receive the text/plain part. If the poster has cut/pasted things,
instead of seeing *some bold text*, you may see *bold **some text* or
similar anomalies.

The bottom line message is use plain text composition to begin with if
it is an option.

Confidently yours,
-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan