Technicalities » email

Full quoting

Mark Brown — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:42:48 +0000

There’s a long standing idea tha one should make an effort to trim out text from the original which is not germane to the new content in your reply. This is not just a bandwidth thing, it’s also about decreasing the effort required for the readers to parse the message – to locate the new text and refresh their memory of the relevant bits of the conversation. Unfortunately it seems that more and more people aren’t doing the cutting.

This causes issues for me mainly because I do a reasonable amount of my mail reading using my phone. It’s no fun wading through pages of diff on an undersized screen such as a mobile phone when the “content” you’re looking for is a one line comment somewhere in the middle. Even on a full size screen it’s often difficult to locate a small piece of new text, but there it needs a much bigger haystack to be an issue.

Please, if you’re one of the people who do this have pity on those of us Reading your messages on smaller devices!

GMail UI issues

Mark Brown — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:48:37 +0000

I read a lot of e-mail, mostly for Linux related purposes. Normally people use well behaved e-mail clients and everything is presented in a fairly standard fashion but there’s some that often stick out like a sore thumb.

The obvious one is Outlook, which has well known idiosyncracies but which some companies force their employees to use even for free software work. The other is GMail. GMail has two problems. One is that the UI appears to encourage people to insert their text into the middle of messages without deleting any context. This makes it hard to notice the new content in big e-mail threads or when someone’s commenting on large patches – searching for the new text is like looking for a needle in a haystack. That said, this is at least partly a user issue – many people manage to use GMail without doing this, it’s just that the GMail UI seems to encourage it more than most other UIs.

The other thing is is that it’s recently decided to format the author information for quoted text in a very odd way:

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Mark
Brown wrote:

What’s happened is that it’s decided to remove the space between the author name and the e-mail address. This causes a very odd word wrapping on the very first line of the message and is really noticable when you’re reading. I’m not sure what inspired that change, there doesn’t seem to be any motivation for it, but it doesn’t seem terribly helpful.

Buffer overflows ahoy

Mark Brown — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:50:36 +0000

I may be wrong on this but it looks like Microsoft SMTP clients (at least Windows Mail and Outlook) don’t like being sent a large volume of SSL certificate information when opening a TLS connection. They appear to assume that the data they are being sent is malformed and assume that STARTTLS failed, continuing with an unencrypted SMTP dialogue.

This can be triggered relatively easily on a Debian system by telling Exim to use all the certificates provided by the ca-certificates package (which is the default configuration). The Windows clients will give an unhelpful “the remote end dropped the connection” style error, caused by the server getting upset by the unexpected fallback to unencrypted SMTP. The server logs will show something like this:

2009-02-17 21:32:55 TLS error on connection from client.example.com (Client) [192.168.192.168] (gnutls_handshake): A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.
2009-02-17 21:33:00 SMTP protocol synchronization error (input sent without waiting for greeting): rejected connection from H=client.example.com [192.168.192.168] input="EHLO Client\r\n"

Configuring the MAIN_VERIFY_TLS_CERTIFICATES option in the Debian Exim configuration (which sets the tls_verifiy_certificates option in the actual Exim configuration) to point to something with less certificates in should avoid the issue.

On the bright side, at least they’re making an effort to avoid overflows.

Upgrading crm114

Mark Brown — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:01:44 +0000

When upgrading from older crm114 releases and trying to retain your existing configuration it is important to check that all the configuration options that the new version expects to be set have been set. While some will cause errors if they’re omitted others will appear to work but will cause unwanted behaviour at runtime. For example, omitting good_threshold and spam_threshold will cause everything to be flagged as spam in X-CRM114-Status even though the classifier is working well.

In practice there are relatively few configuration options that users are expected to configure so it may be easier to redo the configuration based on the example provided. For safety it’s best to delete your existing CSS files too in case they’ve been invalidated by a configuration or format change.

It’s all a bit manual but it’s worth it for what it does for my inbox.

Apple Mail and format=flowed

Mark Brown — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:25:04 +0000

There’s one thing that the Apple Mail client gets right which I’ve never seen anything else try to do – the way it formats messages. Most mail clients seem to offer plain text and HTML as user selectable options and do exactly what they’re told regardless of the content of the message. If HTML is enabled they always send a mail with both text/plain and text/html renditions of the message. Normally the plain text version is a fixed, 80 column version. This is wasteful of bandwidth, especially since very few users actually use any formatting at all, and means that mail programs that don’t do HTML have to treat the mails as though the fixed layout the sending system chooses is important even when it results in poor layout (for example, on mobile devices with small screens).

What Apple Mail does here is to only enable the more complex formatting options if they add information that can’t be represented in the less complex formats. By default mails are sent in text/plain with the format=flowed option to let the reader know it can safely reflow the text and no HTML alternative is generated. If something that can’t be represented using format=flowed is included in the message then a HTML alternative is generated – transparently and without user intervention.

This is good partly because it’s nice to see format=flowed used, it’s a nice technical solution to the problem, but mostly because it’s great user interface design. Most Apple Mail users will never notice if it is or isn’t generating HTML e-mail, they’ll just see that it’s doing what they expect and won’t have to deal with an option that they probably don’t understand or have much of a view on. Other users won’t be troubled with HTML generated by Apple Mail users unless there is some content in the formatting. It’d be good to see more MUAs implementing similar behavior, at least optionally.

Paging Doctor Grumpy

Mark Brown — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:49:05 +0000

Please, folks, when emailing the same question to multiple people or places send a single email with multiple recipients. Don’t send separate mails to each destination – at best you’ll waste people’s time, at worst you’ll irritate them. There are a few exceptions, mostly to do with confidentiality, but they really are pretty rare – especially for free software.

Not that this should be in any way news or non-obvious.

Mobile internet access

Mark Brown — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 18:43:09 +0000

Last weekend I was mostly relying on handheld devices while visiting the wilds of Stockport, trying to decide what Ii want to do when I move off Orange soon (terrible customer service and poor data plans). For this sort of use while travelling my main need is web access and mail reading with IM and SSH access both very desirable too. So, what did I find?

Sony Ericsson P990: This works very well as a web client and 3G modem. Opera is very good at rendering standard pages onto small screens and the jog wheel is a really good interface for selecting and following links – accurate and intuitive. The e-mail client is more of an issue – charitably, it.’s been designed for text messages. No support for IMAP folders and it’s got little hope of rendering 80 column text (due to the screen size) but it does a reasonable job with flowed and HTML text. Battery life is an issue in heavy use, too.
N800: This is slightly too large to use as a secondary device – but the screen size means that it is a spectacularly good web client. It benefits a lot from a Bluetooth keyboard (the N810 has one built in), but without one it’s workable unless entering large quanities of text. It also works well for e-mail when using Modest, which has good support for IMAP (including folders) and renders e-mails well. Unfortunately Modest is still quite obviously pre-release software, having issues with spotty connectivity, but that’ll change. The generally high level of freeness is an obvious win, too, and part of the reason for SSH, Jabber and Skype support. The major wishlist would obviously be a 3G modem on board.
iPod Touch: The same software as the iPhone. The email client is very nice for “standard buisness” e-mails but it toils badly with anything else. Safari is OK for most pages but the zoom based operation can fail badly and finger operation isn’t quite reliable enough – it’s far too easy to either accidentally select links or have it fail to register taps. In the iPhone this would be OK if it were able to act as a bluetooth modem but that’s not supported and the device is totally non-free so you’re stuck with the built in feature set. Obviously, the major selling point is that it is an MP3 player with a reasonably large amount of space but this doesn’t really offset the drawbacks.

So, nothing that’s quite satisfactory in itself. The N800 or an N810 plus a phone that can act as a 3G modem currently seems to meet my needs best.