[Foundation-l] Email list archives

[Austin Hair]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Andrew
Turvey<andrewrturvey at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I hope you don't mind my raising this issue here - it's a technical issue affecting all wikimedia email lists so I thought this would be as good a place as any.

wikitech-l might be more appropriate, but I think I can shed some
light on your problem.

> The word wrapping is all over the shop and the formatting has all been stripped from the text. Some third party re-users do a better job, but it's still not all the way there:
>
> The Mail Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg01470.html
> Google Mail: http://groups.google.com/group/wmf-wikimediauk-l/browse_thread/thread/a350852f8ad2ef63
>
> The line spacing looks funny with the first and you still lose the text formatting with the second.
>
> Has anyone got any tips about how I can either format an email to begin with or view the email afterwards to solve this problem?

I see that you're posting from gmail, so I'm guessing you compose mail
in "rich text" mode—mailman then strips your message of all html, but
doesn't re-format your text and add line breaks.  (And really, should
it?)

Our pipermail archives don't do this either, although (as in the
example you give above) others do by virtue of their CSS formatting.

Switching to "plain text" when composing an e-mail to a Wikimedia
mailing list is the best way to ensure that it's delivered as you
wrote it.  Mailman is actually doing you a favor by accommodating a
message in an invalid format (html), it just doesn't go as far as
you'd like.

> Secondly, has this technology been developed recently? Seems it needs a bit of investment, or alternatively, we need to move over to a better third party platform like, perhaps, Yahoo Groups.

I'm not sure what technology you're talking about, but all of those
involved here are rather old and very well standardized.  RFC 1855
("Netiquette Guidelines"), dating back to 1995, suggests that you
limit your line length to 65 characters, and this has become the
accepted standard.  Most mail clients (gmail included) will wrap
plaintext messages at 65 or 72 characters automatically, but obviously
that's not needed (or wanted) for html.

Hope that helps,

Austin