Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3166 mails)

[Tom Emerson <osnut@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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[actually, I'm replying to John's post next in this thread, but needed to show 
it from this point]

Shown below are the first & last few lines of Mitch's message as it appears to 
me when I use Kmail's "reply-to-list" function:

On Thursday 20 March 2003 7:47 pm, Mitch Thompson wrote:
> On Thursday 20 March 2003 13:19, Tom Emerson wrote:
> > note: some may consider this a shade "off-topic", so if it degenerates
[snip]
> --
> Mitch Thompson, San Antonio TX // WB5UZG
> Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) http://home.satx.rr.com/mlthompson
> Independent Amsoil Dealer http://amsdealer.webhop.biz
> GPG: BBDA 3A2A 4483 BD0D 7CED B8A9 D183 C8F6 B0AF 66AE
> wget -O - http://home.satx.rr.com/mlthompson/pubkey.gpg | gpg --import
> --
> "There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary,
> and those who don't."

I don't claim to know everything that is going on, and I certainly expect this 
to be what I called a "closed system" in a private message -- both Mitch and 
I are using kmail, so *perhaps* kmail does some things that aren't 100% 
standard, but "to me" I see that:

  * I don't see the "---BEGIN PGP MESSAGE---" type headers & footers as text, 
but rather kmail uses these to color-code the message [and in this case it is 
yellow, indicating that while the signature is valid for the message 
contained within, I've never directly or indirectly verified his key]
  * the "reply" action strips these from the reply itself
  * replying FURTHER strips the final-most "signature" applied by the list 
software  [I once had someone send a message that began with the signature 
indicator -- many clients pre-load the signature block when you start a new 
message, so he must have just started typing at the end of that -- in any 
case, my "reply" to him quoted nothing; instant "TOFU" stopper... ;) ]

So, as I said, I think this is a "closed" system in that Kmail understands 
fully how a kmail-composed message is organized, so it doesn't show anything 
as "wrong".  I see from John's headers he is using "messenger-pro/2.61", 
edited by Zap/ZapEmail, so there is some "difference of opinion" between 
these two programs [and I would expect my message to appear to have the same 
problem(s) from John's point of view]

This is worse than browser compatability, and I'm afraid human nature is such 
that everyone will claim that their client is "absolutely correct" and 
haughtily sneer at any other e-mail client "that doesn't work right" and 
claim it "must" be the other client that is "wrong"  [in fact, you might 
almost think that is my attitude, but trust me, it isn't]  I *have* seen 
messages appearing on the kmail developer/bug e-mail list about 
"incompatabilities" between clients, along with samples of messages "as seen 
by" these other clients in an attempt to figure out where things broke down.  
[see bug #55450 -- a sylpheed user noted a problem w/detached signatures; 
turns out an extra cr/lf pair was needed that wasn't immediately obvious]

Unfortunately this requires cooperation of people who aren't using kmail to 
tell the developers of kmail where things aren't correct -- not always an 
easy task :(

Tom
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