[open-government] Off-topic: convenient way to read mailing list ?

Thu Oct 24 23:37:22 UTC 2013

dear ivo,

excellent questions.

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 02:56:38PM +0200, Ivo Babaja wrote:
>    Hi,
>    this is off-topic (or better meta-topic) but I think it would be useful to
>    share what you consider the best way to follow this (or any similar)
>    mailing list.

the best tool is a proper mail client, checking your user-agent header, you
seem to be using Thunderbird, which i know a lot of people use for tracking
mailing lists. and indeed the answer to your question should be: a proper mail
user agent (MUA or you call it simple mail reader). i wonder why you perceive
thunderbird as unfit for this purpose, yet lots of people have no problems.

>    In the simple mail reader, the posts are hard to follow, with all the
>    headers and endless repeating quotations in message bodies.

indeed, that is in fact not a question of your MUA, but a problem with the
senders MUA, and lack of awareness on the venerable netiquette:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 

we must realize that different vendors MUAs encourage different ways of
violating the netiquette (google and microsoft being the worst), making it
hard for all of us.  a simple example is, that you sent your mail as a html
mail, and not a text mail. html in email is a very bad idea, if it requests
resources from the internet, it also serves as a vehicle to security attacks,
furthermore the diversity of MUAs guarantees that someone will not be able to
read your mail, because of the incompatibility of the MUAs, so if you want
your thoughts to be as widely read as possible, make the format the lowest
common denominator, text.

>    It would be useful to be able to follow topics and discussions in the
>    fashion of newsreadrs. There is online mailing list archive service
>    (Gmane) that allows such approach, but open-government is not available in
>    it.

i think this is a splendid idea, it is actually possible to subscribe this
list to gmane: http://gmane.org/subscribe.php

and i suppose since this list is publicly indexed anyway, it should not take
much discussion whether this should be used.

>    Is there any other, maybe desktop solution, for reading mailing lists in
>    more convenient way ?

i think, it would be already a good start, if contributors to this list would
be more aware of how many people read their quite irrelevant top posted
responses like "great work john" with 20 pages of quotations - this is great
to send in private! big mailing-lists with many participants span a wide
spectrum in consciousness and tools available at their disposal for
interacting with them, maybe it's time for some community managers to help the
people behind the scenes in private to enhance the signal to noise ratio.

cheers,s

-- 
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