LuKreme wrote:
On 27-Jan-2010, at 16:00, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
I never, ever want to send HTML mail. The default (and, IMHO,
only) method for sending mail should be as plain text.
No on both counts. The only mode should not be plain text (but maybe
for 1.0) and the default should be styled text.
I agree that I *never* want to send html mail and only want to read
plain text, but we are in the minority. In a very small minority.
No, the default should plain text. The target market for this client
includes power users, many of whom are the kind of users that spend a
very significant amount of time with mailing list discussions, where
plain text rules and people who send HTML mail are frowned upon. So for
these people, the default should be plain text, even if support for
composing HTML mail is added later. Just because mainstream clients set
the default to HTML for average users, doesn't mean we should do so for
power users.
As I'm on a lot of mailing lists, and often threads can get quite
long, I find it's often appreciated to reduce the number of e-mails
sent. One way to do this is to reply once to a whole group of
messages, each individually quoted and attributed one after the
other. This also helps to avoid repeating yourself, since you're
less likely to say the same thing twice in one e-mail, as you are
when responding in separate e-mails. I've heard Pine supports this
sort of functionality, but I've not used Pine myself.
But this screws up threading, so it's not really that useful.
It doesn't screw it up if proper In-Reply-To and References headers are
set in the mail, and refer to the message IDs correctly. These header
fields are defined to accept 1 or more message IDs in RFC 2822, and so
responding to multiple messages is a perfectly reasonble thing to do.
So that it doesn't break threading in any way, it would be very useful
if Letters.app could find an innovative way to clearly indicate each to
which the currently viewed mail is responding to, such as highlighting
each of the messages that were replied to.
So, I would like to be able to select a number of messages in a
thread, choose Reply All, and be presented with a composition
window that quotes and attributes each selected e-mail, one after
the other. The mail should be addressed to the mailing list(s),
with each of the recipients BCC'd. (since there's likely to be a
lot of people addressed, sending by BCC should help to keep the
reply-to list short.
And this will really piss off people who do not like getting
duplicate message from you *and* the list.
Whether or not to CC others in mailing list replies is very much
dependent on the community. In most of the mailing lists I respond to,
doing so is common practice. Personally, receiving a separate copy in
my inbox, separate from the mailing list folder, is useful because I can
immediately see that someone has responded to me. Otherwise, I may miss
the reply, especially if it's a one of the lists where I don't always
read everything. (It's one of the many things I find annoying about the
Reply-To munging that is practiced on a few lists, including this one,
unfortunately)
Often, a thread's participant list can grow rapidly, causing CC
lists to become increasingly long. While I think it's reasonable
to CC the people being directly responded to,
And I think it's proof the poster is aligned with Satan… just
saying.
No, I'm not. I'm one of the more ettiquette people who regularly take
the effort to trim the CC list to only those who are being directly
responded to.
* Automatic BCC to Self
This should be trivial to implement, and not a core function so
"PLUGIN!"
This is very basic functionality that is present in all mail clients
I've ever used, way back to Netscape 4, and I'm pretty sure it was
present well before then too. It's a basic feature in Mail.app,
Thunderbird and Postbox, and should be in this. From my experience, is
quite a common thing for power users to automatically CC or BCC other
addresses, besides themselves, and requiring plugins for basic
functionality like this is silly.
Again, I would like to see the plain text alternative by default
when I receive a multi-part e-mail. I really dislike reading HTML
mail as much as I hate sending it. Ideally, when someone omits the
plain text alternative, the e-mail client should automatically
convert and render the HTML variant as if it were plain text.
Yes, maybe. I think Webkit can do that, so it should be 'free'. If
not, it might require incorporating lynx into the bundle and handling
externally (there's no reason to reinvent the wheel here).
The default rendering should be a monospace font, such as Monaco.
Please do not use Courier for any purpose.
This is a Mac app. it will use the fonts you tell it to use.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm just saying that the default should be set
to a sensible font. Postbox and Thunderbird default to Courier, which
is really uncomfortable to read. We should not copy their mistakes.
--
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/
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