[Tutor] OT: how to best follow the posting style on this list

[Mats Wichmann]

On 09/30/2017 08:37 AM, boB Stepp wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 9:55 AM, Albert-Jan Roskam
> <sjeik_appie at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I often read messages to this list from my Android from the mobile Hotmail page. On other occasions I would read from my browser, from a Windows or a Linux desktop. Howver, Hotmail pretty much sucks when it comes to obeying the posting style [1]. It's even worse than Yahoo mail, which I've also tried (until they got hacked). Is there a recommended way to do this?  Maybe gmail? I prefer to use more or less the same interface across platforms and devices, but this is not crucial. I've also been looking for pan-like apps (not necessarily free) for my Phone, but I couldn't find one that worked. Perhaps because I used a free news server (my ISP doesn't have one).

> 
> So if there is a better way that would make things uniformly *easy*
> across all types of common devices, I would be interested, too!  I
> wonder what the people at Google use for lists like Tutor?  I believe
> there are some such people on the main list.
> 

Thanks for asking, by the way!

Honestly, those of us who care about the stuff in the reference are more
and more being considered dinosaurs... email has pretty much moved on
and almost finished leaving behind the plain-text option.  When I worked
for Samsung for a while, most of the company had to use an in-house
developed mail system as it was the only "approved" one, and it simply
had no option for not emitting styled emails (my organization as
specifically charged with working in the open source world got an
exemption, but that was highly rare).  No I don't know how other
companies deal with the "participate in external mailing list" scenario,
there's certainly enough of them.

I don't have good answers.  I use K-9 on my android phone and it does
fine, although occasionally throws up on _received_ emails with excess
crud. You can set it up as a client of your gmail account if you wish,
you don't have to use gmail to read gmail!  Actually have more trouble
on the desktop: I'm on some mailing list where almost all of the
participants work in Outlook-only shops, and we'll get things like "my
responses interleaved in blue" (guess what: Thunderbird on my Linux
desktop set up the way I have it doesn't show those).  Sometimes get
some funky apparently Outlook-only list style markup come through as
plain text rendering things completely unreadable.  Big sigh...
absolutely nothing I can do about the mess, just have to grit my teeth
and muddle through.

My surviving advice is "do the best you can", wish it was better. You
can look at a message or two you've sent in an archive and see how bad
it comes out, unfortunately reading your own email in the client that
sent it doesn't usually accurately reflect what it will look like to others.