oh, the irony

[cellio]

I just sent mail to the administrator of the Reform movement's mailing lists asking him to stick to the standard. :-)

---

Dear [name],

Thank you for your reply.

> There is no text only version currently available for [list].
> We may pursue this in the near future.

I would like to encourage you to provide this for all of your mailing lists. While of course any service provider is free to support or reject any formats he chooses, the internet community as a whole works better when standards are followed. So far as I know nothing has superseded RFC 822, which calls for email to be sent in plain text. This specifies a minimum, and many modern mail programs also support HTML. However, older mail programs do *not* support HTML well, and even when the mailer itself does, text archives are rendered unreadable if they are not in plain text.

The result of this for me is that while I can mostly read the messages, I cannot usefully save them or pass them on to other interested members of my congregation. Perhaps this is your intent -- that the mailing lists be ephemereal and that people have to subscribe directly. That wouldn't have been my guess, however.

Thank you for your time in considering this matter.

Comments

mmm, pedantry

[geekosaur]

RFC2822 superceded it, actually. And MIME is a full standard... but last I checked it was still recommended that non-text mail use multipart/alternative and include a plain-text version. Not that that helps e.g. web archives that tend to mishandle HTML email in various odd ways (HTML lacks a simple method to reliably embed one HTML document into another).

Re: mmm, pedantry

[cellio]

Really? Thanks for the information. I could find nothing in searches for "mail format" and the like at the RFC site, and 822 said nothing about being superceded (though it says what it supercedes).

I thought that even if you tacked on the other junk (HTML, other MIME, random Microsoft lossage), the plain text was still required. I guess I'm wrong about that. How sad.

As you might have guessed, this is a mailing list that is sending only as text/HTML. Even though pine does mostly render it ok (there are glitches), it still annoys me because I can't easily just pop into emacs to find something in my mail archives when people do crap like that. And pine doesn't offer anything nearly as fast or featureful as regular-expression search in emacs.

Re: mmm, pedantry

[geekosaur]

You need to know how they describe things; the RFCs in question don't say "mail format", they say "message format". :)

RFC 2822 - Internet Message Format

Network Working Group                                 P. Resnick, Editor
Request for Comments: 2822                         QUALCOMM Incorporated
Obsoletes: 822                                                April 2001
Category: Standards Track

And while it does indeed restrict itself to plain text, as RFC822 did, it specifically refers to the MIME RFCs [RFC2045, RFC2046, RFC2049] for transmission of non-text data.

(And, pedantic self-correction: RFC822/STD11 is still the official standard; RFC2822 is still pending. Not to mention that I butchered "supersedes" yet again. :/)

[siderea]

Far be it for me to do anything to discourage your worthy efforts to drag a listadmin, kicking and screaming if necessary, back to the Right Path of plain text. However, if you must solve this problem, allow me to commend highly to you stripmime.pl and procmail. If you are still at jtan, I can certify that both work fine there. (BTW, I finally fled.)

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

The truly scary thing is that with modern software, it's not necessary for a mailing list administrator to even understand your complaint...

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

well put!

Re: mmm, pedantry

[cellio]

Hmm. I thought I had used "message" in one of my queries, but I guess not. I was able to turn up 822 via search, and figured the same search terms that got me there would also get me any relevant subsequent ones.

[cellio]

Y'know, I should really learn how to use procmail one of these days. Thanks.

[cellio]

Indeed. I've encountered many cases to validate your assertion. Sad.

procmail rocks

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

I have procmail setup with spamassassin on my mac (OS 10) and it so rocks. Nothing gets lost and it filters out much of my spam. If you have questions email me.