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

[Øivind Hoel]

On 3/13/06, Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> wrote:
> 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.

Sort of off-topic, but how relevant would a guide to configuring
outlook be considering the general audience og ubuntu lists? Most of
us use Linux, and I don't really think the users who don't would be
using MS outlook....

>
> 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
>
> --
> sounder mailing list
> sounder at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/sounder
>