freebsd vs. netbsd

[Jerry]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 07:56:58 +0200, Polytropon commented:
>On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 23:13:10 -0600, @lbutlr wrote:
>> On 10 Jun 2020, at 23:06, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:  
>> > However, I assume that the use of "reply to all" is so convenient
>> > it is often preferred to "reply to mailing list", that's why
>> > sometimes replies are send "twice"…  
>
>Attention! Here we have a severe case of "MUA ate my homework"!
>
>Your MUA did modify (!) my original message, so the quote is no
>longer correct (as it imples something that I didn't write).
>
>Aspect 1 is no big problem: It removed my newlines and put
>everything into one long line. This is no big deal with
>regular text ("paragraph text"), but would be with code,
>or something laid out to be a table or a diagram in text.

I think that could also be attributed to the fact that many users
configure their MUSs to use a specific font and/or font size that
affects the final display of the received email. I prefer a larger font
myself since my eye sight isn't what it was 20 years ago.

>Aspect 2, and that _is_ a problem: I wrote "...", which is
>three periods, and your MUA turned it into "…", which is
>an UTF-8 ellipsis.

If UTF was used to begin with, that problem would evaporate.

>Aspect 2a, a sign of inconsistency, is that your MUA did
>not change my " double quotation marks (inch symbols) into
>correct typographical quotation marks. And how could it?
>Which rules would apply? I'm in Germany, so our quotation
>marks are "two down" and "two up", while in English, you
>usually how "two in" and "two out", something like this,
>incorrectly simplified:
>
>	,,The german style.''
>
>	``The english style.''

I believe the 'American' style would be:
U+201C and U-201D : “American style”

In any case, I have not seen your 'magical character transpositions" in
my everyday use. Perhaps it is a systemic problem with your MUA.

>And there are of course differences in AE and BE. You can
>also see that I used tabs and empty lines for format my
>reply. If a MUA eats those, big problem.
>
>A typographically skilled person will even say that using
>something like “that“ is wrong (uses same symbol for start
>and end of quoting).
>
>Similarly, MUAs could mess with the use of dashes ("-" or
>"–") or apostrophes ("'" or "’").
>
>All those considerations of course lead to breaking my
>carefully crafted message in plain ASCII (not even using
>ISO-8859-1) and lifting it into the UTF-8 multibyte universe
>with all its unsolved questions. ;-)

I use UTF-8 and find it solves problems, not creates them.

>> A smart MUA (is there one) you have a reply button that replied
>> sender if the messages was directly to you, replied to list if the
>> message was from a list, [...]  
>
>As I mentioned, this will only work as long as the relevant
>headers are intact. If some MUA mangles them on the way (yes,
>I'm looking at you, MICROS~1 products!), this will no longer
>work. And as I've been saying this, MICROS~1 products are
>also known for changing message content (see above, aspect 2),
>and even mangling timestamps and timezones.

"Citation need for products post 2010" I am aware the the latest
versions of MS Outlook can be configured to reformat long lines, (the
removal of soft line breaks) and I actually fine that quite useful. I
use MS Outlook for my job and I find receiving and then trying to read
a long, detailed message in lines restricted to <= 80 characters a real
PIA when I have a 32" HD screen. Of course, YMMV.

>Oh, and MUAs don't have to be smart. It's much better if the
>people using them are smart. That's fully sufficient. :-)

And rarely seen in the wild. :)

>> [...] and made you hit a difficult chorded sequence of 47 keys in
>> precise order in less than 4 seconds to reply to all.  

I put that into the same category as being expected to write a cryptic
30 line XML document to get a simple device to work.

>Which is inconvenient for users who _wish_ to be CCed in the
>typical "reply to all" manner.

Simple solution, join the mailing group. don't put the burden on the
email recipient. Take responsibility for your own actions. I know,
extremely rare these days.

>If I remember correctly, "reply to all" has never been a real
>problem on the FreeBSD mailing lists. Users can set up filtering
>rules to remove duplicate messages they might receive during a
>thread, or remind their counterparts to pay attention to use
>the "reply to mailing list" button.

Unfortunately, some sneaky 'repliers' include the intended recipient's
name in the "To:" field that complicates filtering messages.

>Sadly, Sylpheed has a prominent "reply to all" button, whereas
>"reply to mailing list" is a drop-down element next to the
>regular "reply" button. So you can guess which one gets used
>the most.

Claws-Mail allows a user to create custom folders with predefined
"To:". "CC:" and "Reply-To:" fields, among others. That totally
eliminates all the guess work, assuming the end-user bothered to
properly configure it.

-- 
Jerry


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