Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[José María Mateos]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 11:03:49AM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote:

I feel like *I'm* stuck in the 20th century because I still like mailing
lists. Recently when I tried to explain that for engineering discussions a
mailing list would be better than a slack channel I had to stop to explain
what a mailing list was. (!)


+1 for the love of mailing lists.

Email doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Apparently, some 
people are beginning to wonder whether this is becoming a problem for 
open source projects:


https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/


Reading the article, there's this thing that bothers me:

As an example, my partner submitted a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks 
ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client which didn’t 
mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so he 
could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s 
pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.


So, what's the problem here? That open-source projects use e-mail or 
that e-mail is a tool and when used for technical purposes needs to be 
properly set up?


It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think 
it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it 
from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has 
intentionally moved towards HTML,” she said.


The modern e-mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML *and* 
towards not letting the user do whatever task is actually intended, 
apparently.


E-mail is simple to use. One only has to follow very old, 
well-established rules; see for instance points 2.3 and 2.4 here: 
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/mailing-list-faq/etiquette.html. 
The problem is that at some point someone thought it would be amazing to 
have animated gifs in the middle of your message and reply 'ok' to an 
entire thread from your phone. Everything went downhill from there.


/rant

Cheers,

--
José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 11:03:49AM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote:
> I feel like *I'm* stuck in the 20th century because I still like mailing
> lists. Recently when I tried to explain that for engineering discussions a
> mailing list would be better than a slack channel I had to stop to explain
> what a mailing list was. (!)

It does not matter where you come from, it matters where you are going.

> Email doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Apparently, some people
> are beginning to wonder whether this is becoming a problem for open source
> projects:
> 
> https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/

The way I see it, lots of people talk about "deficiencies of email",
but they somehow manage to never mention deficiencies of software
which gave them this pitiful experiences.

Strange, no?

It is being said, never ascribe to malevolence what can be ascribed to
stupidity, so here we go: it takes lots of stupidity to deliver poorly
written email software, year after year (while having access to the
best developers in the world and insane heaps of money), when well
working software had been known for decades. And it is open source, so
all it would take was copy stuff and read the licence.

"Blame email" meme is nice excuse for incompetence, which everybody
(journalists, business folk) can easily memorize and repeat.

At least this is what I can deduce from multiple news on the internet,
read over some time.

This guy describes his point of view, based on his experience with
nasty client software:

https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2011/02/problem-isnt-email-its-microsoft.html

Almost ten years passed, and I do not think changes were for the
better. But I have never had much (if any) first hand expierience with
non-free MUAs. Only had to plow through multitude of discussion
threads broken and ripped apart by incompetent programs.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
** **
** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **