Formatted vs. plain text mail (was: Call for testing the new dist-upgrade process)

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday 13 March 2006 17:12, Matthew East wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 15:59 +0100, Jan Claeys wrote:
> > Op ma, 13-03-2006 te 17:21 +1100, schreef Jeff Waugh:
> >
> > OTOH, IMNSHO, the CoC also applies to sending HTML mail without
> > caring about other people.  Netiquette tells us not to send HTML
> > (or other formatted[*]) mails unless one can be sure the
> > recipient(s) can read it without jumping through loops (saving
> > the attachment & opening it in a browser isn't very productive
> > either).
>
> I've been thinking for a while about a wiki page with mailing list
> netiquette, the Italian team has one and it works rather well.
>
> Perhaps somebody could revive the old project on this page, and
> make a page which people who post badly to mailing lists can be
> (politely) pointed to.
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ListiQuette

It's always good to have the rules available somewhere where they can 
be referred to. But, in my experience, people who break mailing list 
rules usually don't know them, don't know where to find them, seldom 
read them and generally don't bother with them till someone points 
the rules out (usually on the list, which leads to a flame-fest...)

Solution: set up Mailman to auto-generate a mail containing the list 
rules to the sender *every*time* they send HTML mail. First sentence 
is a nice polite "You have sent HTML-formatted mail to a mailing list 
where the other members would rather you didn't." Include the 
instructions for getting Outlook to send plain text to specific 
addresses. Reply-To is set to a dev/null address. Send an HTML mail = 
receive a please-don't-do-this *every*time*. Sooner or later it sinks 
in.

Benefits: The rest of us don't have to explain why it's not 
appreciated. Flame war potential is reduced. The hassle and 
irritation moves from the list members onto the HTML originator, 
where it belongs. 

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five