The Gateway

Comments (4)

1. 
   Daniel Berger December 3rd, 2006 Reply Link

   Are you rejecting HTML messages out of hand or simply stripping the HTML?

   I'm pretty sure I've sent emails in HTML format by mistake, since that's what Thunderbird defaults to.

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   2. 
      James Edward Gray II December 3rd, 2006 Reply Link

      I am not doing anything about HTML. I forward all emails Ruby Talk receives to the NNTP host the Gateway uses.

      That host rejects posts that are not appropriate for Usenet. (It's important to remember that Usenet is a different world than mailing lists and has its own rules.) Many Usenet servers block HTML posts (sent as multipart/alternative) and the host the Gateway uses is the one of them. Even if we had our host lift this ban, the message would have poor circulation on the Usenet hosts and it's hard to see that as an improvement.

      It is feasible that we could convert HTML emails before forwarding them to Usenet and try to get them down to a reasonable format. Some emails would be pretty non-trivial to handle correctly though, in my opinion.

      Sending HTML email is a frowned upon by more than just our NNTP host though. Spam Assassin assigns spam points just for an email being formatted as such and since that's pretty much a standard now, you best avoid the format if you want your message to actually get where you sent it. It's probably an even bigger sin in tech communities like Ruby Talk, where we are constantly working with code.

      Given that, I'm not too concerned about burning effort to do the HTML conversions myself. I'll offer a compromise though, I'm going to release the code the Gateway uses on this blog soon. Others who are interested are welcome to offer up changes to the code to handle these and other issues. We will debate their value and I may choose to include some modifications.

      My opinion is that this is an important enough issue to spend a few moments learning how to configure your email client properly though.

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      2. 
         Daniel Berger December 3rd, 2006 Reply Link

         I think making some effort to strip HTML would be reasonable, perhaps with a warning attached somewhere in the message that it was reformatted. That, or a reply to the sender that HTML formatted email is unwelcome. Or both. Something tells me that hpricot will be involved one way or another. :)

         As for configuring email clients, it's not as easy as you might think. In Thunderbird, there are actually two different places to specify settings for message composition.

         In MS Outlook, I still don't think I've gotten it set right, as it insists on replying in HTML format if that's the format I received the original post in, even though I've selected options that are supposed to make all of my replies plain text.

         Mind you, that's mostly a moot point now with the annoying disclaimer my company has decided to tack onto all outgoing emails (perhaps an issue in and of itself that we may want to tackle some day). Now I use Gmail via the web browser which, btw, I will now have to remember to set to plain text before hitting the send button. :)

         Hopefully this reply didn't sound like whining. It's not meant to, anyway. Just a heads up as to what some of the issues are that the end users will be facing.

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         2. 
            James Edward Gray II December 3rd, 2006 Reply Link

            Thanks for volunteering for the HTML assistance. ;)

            I'll get the code up for you soon.

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