Excessive spacing on text/plain email content

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The discussion revolves around excessive spacing in text/plain email content sent by Discourse. niemeyer initially reported the issue, citing an example of an email with excessive padding around the actual post content. zogstrip asked for reproduction steps, which niemeyer demonstrated by showing another example. elijah emphasized the importance of observing the issue and provided methods to do so.

niemeyer explained that the text/plain part is used by clients that cannot or prefer not to render HTML content, and that a real person complained about the odd spacing in their email client. elijah shared their positive experience with Discourse’s text/plain rendering, but noted that it should be labeled as text/markdown instead. They agreed with niemeyer that the issue is a “minor nit.”

1

Hello again, and just one more minor nit.

The stock email templates seem to be adding too much padding around the actual post content.

Here is an example just received:

----==_mimepart_58f8139956892_20ce3fbcdc0cd6bc7471c
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit




<actual content>






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إعجابَين (2)
Configuring end-of-line characters for text versions of emails? (default of CR+LF appears double-spaced)
2

Can you describe how to reproduce this issue?

3

You just reproduced it:

----==_mimepart_58f8712877df0_663f8ea8de3cdc3799b
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit




Can you describe how to reproduce this issue?






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إعجاب واحد (1)
4

Not asked, but equally important: Can you describe how to observe this issue?

Some answers:

  1. Use a mail user agent (MUA) that prefers text/plain parts to text/html parts. (I use a heavily customized version of mailx, your milage may vary.)
  2. View the mail file on disk in a text editor to see how it is constructed.
  3. Use power tools in your MUA of choice to look at other MIME alternative formats.
إعجابَين (2)
5

I think he’s referring to the view source of the email..

Precedence: list
List-ID: <meta.bbs.boingboing.net>
List-Archive: https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/edit-history-now-public/99450

----==_mimepart_58f908eba5b52_11c33fab8d1417201288cf
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit




@sam? @codinghorror? @orenwolf? @bueller?






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[Visit Topic](https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/edit-history-now-public/99450/2) or reply to this email to respond.

Why this would matter to anyone, ever, I have no idea.

6

The text/plain part is actually used as-is by clients that cannot or prefer not to render the HTML content, which I assume is the reason why Discourse is including it in the first place. As some empirical evidence, the reason I’m reporting is that a real person with a real email client complained that the spacing is odd in the usual client that tends to work well otherwise (for some value of that).

3 إعجابات
7

As a real person who uses an email client (might not be real) who does see the text/plain parts, my feeling is Discourse is above average here. I have a little nit that the text is text/markdown, not text/plain, but it looks a lot better than some sites that obviously just use very poor html to text filters. “Oh, look, it forgot to strip the style sheet!”

The “minor nit” bit from the first post is probably accurate.

5 إعجابات