Mailing List Etiquette was freebsd vs. netbsd

[Chris Knipe]

> > And again - there's absolutely -nothing- wrong with that at all, I never
> > said that there was... Millions of companies provide support to millions
> of
> > users every day using email... That being said, I get a 80 character
> plain
> > text email from a company as "support," I deem that as unprofessional,
> and
> > the email will more than likely just be deleted.  We live in modern
> times,
> > unfortunately.  Presentation matters, whether you like it or not.
>
> Interesting apoach. Do you value presentation more than content?
> In case of support, personally I would want something that helps
> me solving my problem, not something that looks good. Sadly, the
> "looks good" has lead to many technically inferior solutions
> becoming a de-facto standard, because the better solutions simply
> "don't look as good".
>

You hardly get good support these days from companies irrespective of how
the email is formatted, so for the most part I don't personally bother with
emails to begin with.  Google for the most part, yields much better
results, and for the most part I don't need to care how an email is
formatted.  Again, we live in an online, and connected world (for the most
part).




> > Cut & paste from the attachment, then you won't have any formatting
> issues
> > from any MUAs, but I guess it's too much effort to open the attachment.
>
> Certain MUAs display the attachmend right underneath the message,
> especially if it's things like images or text that can be easily
> embedded. Depending on the MUA in use, getting the content of the
> attachment requires one or more additional steps, but it should
> not be a problem.
>
> What _could_ be a problem is that the mailing list explicitely
> does not support attachments in general, or only allows a specific
> subset of formats (like plain text attachments).
>
> But as I mentioned in an earlier message, sometimes code is "inlined"
> in a message, or even in a paragraph, for example:
>         Filesystem          Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
>         /dev/gpt/sysroot    213G    196G    480M   100%    /
>         devfs               1,0K    1,0K      0B   100%    /dev
>         tmpfs               5,8G    4,0K    5,8G     0%
> /compat/linux/dev/shm
>         procfs              4,0K    4,0K      0B   100%    /proc
>         linprocfs           4,0K    4,0K      0B   100%
> /compat/linux/proc
> And see that I didn't put any linebreaks here, so if a MUA now
> goes ahead and collapses it into one line, then rendering that
> line in a paragraph mode (ragged right or justified), depending
> on your settings (font size, font face, window size etc.), it
> became totally useless.
>

And I copy and paste that into a text editor, it formats perfectly.  I
agree with you, the MUA is the problem - I maintain what I'm saying
however, you're not going to change the MUA, and you're not going to change
what MUA users use, or don't use.  There is no solution to this.  We can go
on about this every few years, as has been happening on this mailing list
every few years since I've been subscribed to it.




> Again, too much effort to open a URL
> right?

If you are offline, yes. Having a message full of external
resources and not being able to access them reduces the value
of said message to zero.

But if I'm offline, I might not have access to my email either?  I fail to
see the difference?




> I forgot that in the old days without GUIs, we couldn't even double
> click.  I guess you still can't today.

Please don't insult people. And: Yes, there are a few users who
probably can't click, or use any GUI at all. They surely are a
minority, but excluding them just by being in "snob mode" is not
fair. Yes, I'm primarily talking about users with extremely
limited eyesight, and blind users.

Then please don't insult me either.  And I am not referring to you (please
read the message in the context that it was posted).  Almost every message
from Aryeh towards me is insultitive.

--
C