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 So far as I know nothing has superseded RFC 822, which calls for email to be sent in plain text.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RFC2822 superceded it, actually.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).

[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...