[Mailman-Users] Carriage Return in Archives

[Topaz877 at aol.com]

Hi J C,

Regarding the principle of least surprise, the messages that have long lines 
in the archives arrive in my inbox perfectly formatted. So, it was a surprise 
to me that they did not line wrap in the archives. I suspect that AOL did 
this for me though I haven't researched it.

To me, content is the most important thing. What did the person say in their 
message? As such, ease of reading in the archives is important to me. This is 
partly why I use the stripmime script.

As far as fidelity, preserving the headers seems to be the most important 
thing, which Mailman does in the .mbox file.

If I had a list of IT savvy users, it would be no problem. But my users are 
savvy in other things, which are the things they wish to discuss on my lists.

Some prefer to get no e-mail, and just read the list archives. This becomes 
frustrating when you have to scroll horizontally for a long time.

I understand that I may be in the minority here. Even though I'm not a Python 
programmer, I do write other languages and can figure it out, though not as 
elegantly as the Mailman team could.

I would just like to suggest that this be an option. I have a feeling that a 
lot of list administrators who have non-technical subscribers, and who have 
migrated their lists from Yahoo, as a lot of people have done, would 
appreciate it.

-Susan

P.S. - People wouldn't have moved their lists from Yahoo if they didn't feel 
that this was a better product. I know I'm happy I was able to!


In a message dated 11/9/02 2:46:54 PM Eastern Standard Time, claw at kanga.nu 
writes:

> On Sat, 9 Nov 2002 12:45:35 EST 
>  Topaz877  <Topaz877 at aol.com> wrote:
>  
>  > The problem isn't with mail delivery, it's with the archives. It goes
>  > without saying that Mailman can't do anything about how users
>  > configure their mail clients. But Mailman does control how the
>  > *archives* are displayed.
>  
>  Should the archive display messages as they were sent, or should it
>  attempt to "know best" and do what it thinks is right, over-riding the
>  specifics in the messages?  No matter which answer its easy to come up
>  with dozens of cases where its wrong.  Once past that there are concepts
>  and questions of fidelity: Is your archive an accurate representation of
>  list traffic?  Is the fact that it is (or is not) accurate, significant?
>  
>  Then there's the question and principle of least surprise: Which is more
>  surprising, and archive which reformats or one which doesn't?
>  
>  For me its critical that the archives are accurate, both as to
>  formatting and content, and that fact is significant as the archives are
>  (effectively) the one recorded "historical truth" as regards that list.
>  
>  -- 
>  J C Lawrence                
>  ---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
>  claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?       
>  http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
>  
>