Re: [Pan-users] Re: clearing headers?

[Timothy Hamilton]

On Friday October 3 2008 21:57:49 Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Oct 2008 02:59:00 am Travis wrote:
> > So you sent HTML mail again.  Don't blame it on Verizon.  Verizon is
> > my ISP and I decide how my mail is sent.
>
> Timothy's email included a perfectly valid non-HTML plain text message
> body. If your mail client is broken, don't blame the sender for acting
> as if it is 2008 instead of 1978. I think it's time for you to start
> use a proper mail client, one that understands multi-part emails and is
> sensible enough to suppress the HTML part when there is a non-HTML part
> available.

A couple of things occurred to me during this mini-fiasco.

First, if you don't set up an application, say an email client, from scratch 
very often, it is highly unlikely that you will remember every single possible 
option and set them all appropriately on the first try. I almost never send 
emails in HTML. I only say "almost never" because I'm sure there were 3 or 4 
times in the last 10 years, when I wanted to send a formatted email. 
Consequently, I simply forgot to check what the default was. 

I'm as surprised as anyone that the default for Kmail seems to be HTML and not 
plain text.

Second, I don't post to this list very often. And as far as I can tell, this 
is the only place where I need to use plain text and not HTML. That at least 
makes it plausible & understandable why I didn't catch Kmail defaulting to 
HTML before my mini-fiasco.

Third, having my sin of using HTML pointed out several times in ways which 
were not exactly rude but not clearly not exactly friendly either, strongly 
suggests behaviors and attitudes that are dismissive and even unkind to 
newbies. Nitpicking rarely comes across as anything but condescending and 
arrogant. Or more clearly phrased: in light of recent behaviors, I would be 
reluctant to give this mailing list as a resource for someone new to Linux.

Fourth, there's nothing quite so tedious as having one's mistakes, whether 
careless or not, pointed out several times. Especially with the implication 
that the only possible explanations considered for those mistakes are 
inexperience, carelessness, and thoughtlessness.

Fifth, and as a follow up to my third point, it shouldn't be that hard to 
write a script that would strip html tags from incoming emails. I don't know 
if this would necessarily work for those who read the PAN-USERS mailing list 
through gmane, though.

Anway, enough said. This has gotten off topic.

tim