On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Andrew Turvey<[email protected]> 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/[email protected]/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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
