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Re: Stripping multipart/alternative messages and accepting thetext/plain part.
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 06:58:35PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 7:49 PM, Jonathan Larmour <jifl@jifvik.org> wrote:
>> On 11/03/12 22:10, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>>>
>>> Comments on allowing HTML email?
>>
>> I thought I, for one, tackled the main issues as part of here:
>>
>> http://sourceware.org/ml/overseers/2012-q1/msg00070.html
>
>I am not on the overseers mailing list and your reply did not include
>my email (and I did not consider that I should be reading the list).
>Thank you for following up with a summary.
>
>Could you please comment on the strategy of using DIR/mimeremove to
>allow legitimate use of multipart/alternative email that has a minimum
>of a text/plain part?
>
>Think of text/plain as a "safe" rendering of the text/html part that
>users send and therefore acceptable to the list as a whole, while
>still keeping out the spammers that send only html email.
>
>So far I see the following consensus:
>
>* Per Bothner - General agreement that HTML email has some benefit. No
>direct comment on DIR/mimeremove.
>
>* Christopher Faylor - Not keen on DIR/mimeremove for reasons of
>stripping html attachments, but not explicitly against the idea.
If that is what you got from my message then I really wasn't clear.
I'll try to be clearer: I'm not interested in dealing with any fallout
from this type of change. I think it will potentially make supporting
mailing list problems more difficult since it might require debugging of
mail messages to figure out why something did or didn't get through.
So, I think it is an unnecessary complication and, if implemented, I'll
punt any support requests to somebody else.
And, in case it isn't clear, I don't see anyone else (except very
occasionally fche) dealing with mailing list complaints so it would be a
new role for someone to have to handle these issues. I have been
dealing with postmaster mail for years so someone else would have to
also start actively monitoring it.
I've been biting my tongue but I guess I'll say this too: I have to
wonder about the quality and dedication of any would-be contributor who
is thrown by the requirement of performing a minor tweak to their email
client. I could see this being an obstacle on, say, the cygwin list
(and it surely is there) but I don't understand why a technical
contributor would find this a challenge. Or, if it isn't a challenge,
then I don't understand why it would be such a bone of contention that
it would turn them off from ever contributing.
cgf