Integration of snapcraft and devices mailing lists

Hello all,

We’re almost done integrating the traditional snapcraft and devices mailing lists and the forum. The goal is having our conversations in fewer places so that we can communicate, share information, and collaborate more effectively.

In practice, forum@snapcraft.io or any specific category at forum+<category>@``snapcraft.io may be mailed and it will work similar to the mailing list. You can also respond to any posts you get via email as usual. Next the traditional snapcraft@snapcraft.io and devices@snapcraft.io addresses will also land in the forum. The forum web interface may also be used by requesting a new password for your usual email.

For more details, read on.

The migration us being done in a way that attempts to preserve the mailing list semantics previously in place. In particular, those subscriptions migrated from the snapcraft list will receive an email for any posts in the #snap, #snapcraft, #release, #doc, and #forum categories, which reproduces somewhat well the nature of the content that used to circulate in the mailing list. Devices-only subscribers will similarly only get automatic watches on the #device category. Notably lacking from that list are the #snapd, #store, and #device categories. Those settings may be changed to expand or contract what is watched by visiting the Categories section in the personal preferences page.

The process is taking place in the following phases:

  • :white_check_mark: Accept replies to topics via email
  • :white_check_mark: Accept new messages at forum@snapcraft.io
  • :white_check_mark: Accept new messages at forum+<category>@``snapcraft.io
  • :white_check_mark: Moderate new subscriptions to the old list
  • :white_check_mark: Export subscribers from the old list
  • :white_check_mark: Deduplicate subscriptions between list and forum
  • :white_check_mark: Moderate all posts to the old list
  • :white_check_mark: Notify everybody about the changes in progress
  • :white_check_mark: Subscribe everybody to the forum preserving similar semantics
  • :white_circle: Redirect old snapcraft@snapcraft.io address into the forum.
  • :white_circle: Redirect old devices@snapcraft.io address into the forum.

So we’re pretty much done by now.

If you have any issues, please respond to this post, or if you cannot reach the forum for any reason, please contact me directly at niemeyer@canonical.com. Some of the usernames were automatically assigned based on your email, but we can easily change it if you want a different one.

2 Likes

I don’t suppose there’s any option to make the plain-text version of those e-mails a bit more pleasant to read for those of us using mutt or similar text-only e-mail clients?

The e-mails that are being sent out are very far from being as readable as the mailing-list was. The lack of any kind of line wrapping being the most noticeable difference.

It’s also obviously breaking my filters but it looks like the forum is at least setting enough headers that proper filtering should be possible to redirect everything where it belongs.

Wrapping lines on the sending side tends to be a bad idea because it assumes the screen size of the reader is known. That often means modern clients – specially on mobile phones and similar small screens – get a broken down experience in the opposite direction.

Here is one of your mails to the list as seen in a mobile phone, for example:


Hopefully mutt should be able to render long lines reasonably by now, though. Have you looked at smart_wrap?

So this is what your last post looks like here (attached).

The plain text part of the e-mail generated by the forum is full of
extra empty lines at the top and contains various html tags in what’s
supposed to be the plain text version of the message.

I looked around a bit at what Google and other apps seem to be doing and
what I see is that their plain text content is wrapped at 78 chars to
follow RFC3676 (text/plain definition).

They also don’t contain any html tags and instead tend to just show
placeholders ([1]) and including the links at the bottom of the e-mail.

Such senders (unlike my own mutt as your screen shows) include BOTH
plain/text and html versions of the message. The html version, which
phones will typically prefer aren’t wrapped and so don’t suffer from
what you’re showing.

The tags you see there are markdown. It is in fact the actual raw format used when typing out via the web interface, and the same you can use from your email client to get proper syntax displayed online, or when copy & pasting someone else in a way that preserves the original formatting used. There’s no way out of that. Either we use a platform that allows rich formatting and embedded images, or we don’t.

Then, as mentioned in the prior email, when one intends for the sentences to read properly on a mobile client and not awkwardly broken down, whether in Discourse or on a purpose-specific one such as the Gmail application in Android, the line shouldn’t be manually broken. Whether the RFC agrees or not, that’s what happens both in the Gmail application and in the web browser if you read the message you just sent.

The extra spacing at the top and at the bottom seems unnecessary indeed. I’ll look into this to see if I can reduce it.

The “&ndash;” doesn’t look like markdown to me. Nor does the “<img src=”//"…" bit.

The rest of the content looks reasonable and in line with what I get from things like Gtihub, Launchpad, Google services, … (except that all of those wrap their plain/text message).

For the wrapping. The common thing to do, which AFAICT all webmails and modern e-mail clients (so not mine) do, is wrap the plain/text version according to the RFC and not do any wrapping on the html version.

If Discourse’s behavior was common practice, my mailbox would be full of similar examples from all the other webservices I’m using every day, but that’s not the case at all. In fact, looking around for similarly unwrapped plain/text e-mails, the only examples I can find are in my SPAM folder.

Hey Gustavo,

One other small issue is that replies seem to get sorted under the main
topic and not under the message they are replying to (at least in tb,
which is the default ubuntu email client), that makes conversations
harder to follow

email
|_reply
|_reply_to_reply

instead of

email
|_reply
  |_reply_to_reply

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher

I would agree that the norm is (and should be) to wrap the text/plain copy and to leave the text/html version (not that wrapping or not wrapping that makes any difference because it is html). Then our dumb mailers will display it reasonably well and your phone will wrap the html as it sees fit.

-apw

1 Like

@seb128 I wonder if that’s always the case, or if it depends on whether one is replying to a message at the end or in the middle. In this response I clicked at the final Reply button at the bottom, for example, since I’m replying to multiple people. So it’s natural that it’d be at the bottom.

@stgraber That’s actually the markdown syntax supported by GitHub too: https://gist.github.com/niemeyer/b15775969aba896b947c962d0874a520

@apw The issue here is that these plain/text conversations are more than just text directly oriented towards human eyes, which is the usual case. They are also the representation of the rich formatting that is used here. If the text was broken down at arbitrary lengths, the visualization of that content would be corrupted on roundtrips.

If only wrapping long text lines was something easy to do… :slight_smile:

If I want to see everything to the forum, should I just leave Categories empty? I created an account early and therefore wasn’t migrated and my Categories is empty but I seem to be receiving emails. I want to make sure I don’t miss anything.

If you want to see all posts on all topics except for those explicitly muted, there’s a “Mailing list mode” which may be enabled in your personal preferences:

I didn’t use that option during the list migration because people would get a volume and nature of information incompatible with what they were used to, specially regarding the discussions in #snapd.

Ah yes, I am using that which explains why I have the desired behavior even though I didn’t know why. Thanks! :slight_smile:

I guess you are speaking about the web ui? I’m replying from my mail
client, that said I don’t see my previous message in the list emails I
received (it that a feature to not notify the sender?) so I can’t tell
how it has been sorted and I don’t know if others also reply from they
email client…

Cheers,

Sebastien Bacher

Hey Gustavo,

I still see that issue and it makes it difficult to follow conversations
since replies are “flattened” and not sorted out under the message they
reply to … what would be the right place to file a bug report about it?

Thanks,
Sebastien Bacher

Hey Seb,

Best place to report this is at https://meta.discourse.com.