On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Jeff Kinz wrote: > On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 01:35:28PM -0500, Erik Hemdal wrote: > > Someone else wrote: > > > This might be a silly list newbie tangent, but since this > > > list is using Mailman, and if this is such a big concern for > > > the Red Hat folks, why haven't the list maintainers simply > > > turned on the feature that strips out HTML and attachments? > > > Could a list member ask them to do look into doing so? > > > > > > > For what it's worth, note that by default, Thunderbird Mail comes up sending > > HTML mail. You have to mess with various options to get it to behave nicely > > with plain text. A newcomer to Fedora might not realize what's happening > > because Thunderbird does so much prettyprinting just on its own volition, so > > it's not always easy to know whether you're in HTML or plaintext mode. > > Erik nails it! (One cosmic attaboy to his karmic resume:-) > > If HTML posts were stripped by the mailing list software many newcomers > would never be able to post to the list at all, hence they would > effectively never be able to access the list. Latest Mailman 2.1.5 has the ability to strip the markup from HTML posts and send them out as plain text. Lat time this suggestion was made, RH wasn't running the latest Mailman. MM 2.0.x does not have this capability. It looks like they are running a 2.1.x MM now, so they could do this. > > HTML posts have to be able to get into the list so that people aren't > kept out by accident. Once they post, they can be updated on the > right way to do it, but first we have to make sure that we get their > first post. > > In a way its an extension of the UNIX standard philosophy, You are given > the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot. > > (We will ignore, for the moment, the huge cost to RedHat of the processing > load to strip out HTML from all their mailing lists. Note, all RH's > mailings lists are handled by the same software) > > > -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
