Suggestion regarding mailing lists

[qubist]

Hi,

I understand it is obviously a common practice to top post and
(re)quote huge amounts of text just (including signatures), just to
append a small reply to a limited part of the whole quote. A common does
not mean good though, especially considering repeated mentions in
various discussions that usability is a concern.

It is not useful to a subscriber, and even less to archives reader, to
scroll through pages of extra text that will never be read in full, in
order to find the actual reply. It is bad for people with accessibility
problems too. Although today network traffic is not such a problem as
it used to be, it is probably worth mentioning that aspect too, as it
may be an issue for people on slow mobile networks and/or limited
traffic plans.

If mods agree with that, I would like to suggest to inform newcomers
(e.g. through a welcome message) that top posting is bad and to
possibly conform to RFC1855 recommendations.

I am suggesting this on the dev list but it applies to all discussion
boards.

Best regards.

[qube...@4forl1st5.slmail.me]

On Tuesday, March 24th, 2026 at 09:19, qubist <qubist...@riseup.net> wrote:
>
> This email failed anti-phishing checks when it was received by SimpleLogin, be careful with its content.
> More info on https://simplelogin.io/docs/getting-started/anti-phishing/
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> ------------------------------

> Hi,
>
> I understand it is obviously a common practice to top post and
> (re)quote huge amounts of text just (including signatures), just to
> append a small reply to a limited part of the whole quote.

> ...

>
> If mods agree with that, I would like to suggest to inform newcomers
> (e.g. through a welcome message) that top posting is bad and to
> possibly conform to RFC1855 recommendations.

I think you are fighting a losing battle, and that you may even have
chosen the wrong battleground, in suggesting that people read an RFC.

I will go out on a limb and claim that "most people" don't top-post by
choice: the default settings in their email client does it for them.

Unless you can tell (maybe: show) people how to avoid doing it, by
providing details of how to reset defaults in all of the common email
clients - which will require pictures - you have little hope of success.

The sort of people who would know how to read an RFC (or man page),
probably aren't going to be top-posting anyway.

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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I agree in principle, top-posting (and not cutting irrelevant parts)
makes it harder to follow mailing list discussion, especially if there
are several questions in one email. I used to have this in the email
signature:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

But, I kinda gave up... especially after several cases where people
honestly trying to bottom post made it even worse (for example by not
having ">" before quoted text, so you can't see which parts are their
response). I think the above is a good diagnosis - many (most?) email
clients default to top-post and it's not always obvious how to
bottom-post there.

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
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[Ben Grande]

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Hash: SHA256

On 26-03-24 12:29:22, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 11:15:03AM +0000, qubes-os via qubes-devel wrote:
> > On Tuesday, March 24th, 2026 at 09:19, qubist <qubist...@riseup.net> wrote:
> > > I understand it is obviously a common practice to top post and
> > > (re)quote huge amounts of text just (including signatures), just to
> > > append a small reply to a limited part of the whole quote.
> > > ...
> >

> > ...

> > I will go out on a limb and claim that "most people" don't top-post by
> > choice: the default settings in their email client does it for them.
> >
> > Unless you can tell (maybe: show) people how to avoid doing it, by
> > providing details of how to reset defaults in all of the common email
> > clients - which will require pictures - you have little hope of success.

> > ...

>
> I agree in principle, top-posting (and not cutting irrelevant parts)
> makes it harder to follow mailing list discussion, especially if there
> are several questions in one email. I used to have this in the email
> signature:
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
>
> But, I kinda gave up... especially after several cases where people
> honestly trying to bottom post made it even worse (for example by not
> having ">" before quoted text, so you can't see which parts are their
> response). I think the above is a good diagnosis - many (most?) email
> clients default to top-post and it's not always obvious how to
> bottom-post there.

I tried to reply interleaved via GMail, clicking the button to show
quote message, tried replying correctly, quoting seemed right when
rendered as HTML but wrong when rendered as text/plain. This can only be
noticed after sending the message, when you compose with text/html.

Client's behavior:

- - GMail: it seems that the only option to quote properly is rendering
all mails as plain text.
- - Proton: didn't check today, but I remember seeing "view message as
plain text" for individual messages. There might be a global setting
also.
- - Thunderbird: when clicking the button to edit the quoted message, it
renders it as text/plain, even though messages default to text/html. I
think it is a nice behavior.
- - TUIs: Mutt and others "content_type=text/plain" as default.

The documentation [0] can be improved, it should be documented how to do
so on most popular clients. But I am going to discard TUIs in this
matter, because they are not affected. I don't think all users wants to
default their content type to text/plain, as it can be painful when the
received message from a service has more HTML than some website pages. I
believe that recommending Thunderbird for GUI users will improve things,
although I can agree that not everybody wants to switch their mail
client.

[0] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/r4.3/introduction/support.html#do-not-top-post

- --
Benjamin Grande
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[qubist]

On Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:15:03 +0000 qubes-os via qubes-devel wrote:

> I think you are fighting a losing battle, and that you may even have
> chosen the wrong battleground, in suggesting that people read an RFC.

I am only suggesting a welcome message with recommendations for new
subscribers. To stop losing a battle, there should be a dose of
fighting back.

> I will go out on a limb and claim that "most people" don't top-post by
> choice: the default settings in their email client does it for them.

I am aware of that.

> Unless you can tell (maybe: show) people how to avoid doing it, by
> providing details of how to reset defaults in all of the common email
> clients - which will require pictures - you have little hope of
> success.

While that is surely possible, it is probably more meaningful to
explain principles good for the community (just like we have the
community guidelines), rather than educate people who are intelligent
enough to be developers or Qubes users (far smarter than other-OS users
- my observation) how to configure a mail client. :)

> The sort of people who would know how to read an RFC (or man page),
> probably aren't going to be top-posting anyway.

Those will skim through the welcome message faster and will know the
reason for it. The rest will hopefully pay attention. Short PM
reminders may stimulate them if the didn't.

Do you see anything wrong with that?

[qubist]

On Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:12:11 +0100 Ben Grande wrote:

> I believe that recommending Thunderbird for GUI users will improve things

I would recommend Claws Mail.
It runs fine in a VM with 1G RAM (and there are 300+ MB unused).

[Yangdong]

I believe https://useplaintext.email has recommendations for
plaintext-default or plaintext-supporting MUAs, and guides on how to configure
popular clients (e.g. Thunderbird) to respect conventions.

Also, my mail client may not be properly configured for mailing lists, so
if anything is wrong with this email, please tell me.
--
Yangdong Z. \( 'u')/
If I made any mistakes, please point them out!

[qubist]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:31:20 +0900 Yangdong wrote:

> I believe https://useplaintext.email has recommendations for
> plaintext-default or plaintext-supporting MUAs, and guides on how to
> configure popular clients (e.g. Thunderbird) to respect conventions.

Perhaps a welcome/reminder note can be as simple as a short:

====

Do not top post.
Limit quoted text to the point.
No HTML mail.

====

Maybe also add links like the one you shared.