7 ms·

Microsoft's war on plain text email in open source

72 points by dddddaviddddd 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eckza 6y ago
Man, they are really getting aggressive with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish these days. High barrier to entry for Linux kernel patching seems like a feature, not a bug.
jonchang 6y ago
This should probably just be updated to point to The Register's article: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
- yodon 6y ago
  From the register article: > It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML,” she said.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
How is this a "war" on plain text email? It is a true statement and it doesn't really sound like a huge corporate initiative, just a personal comment from one of the executives.
mfcl 6y ago
Surely if you want to patch the Linux kernel, then you can deal with text based emails?
- drchiu 6y ago
  I was just thinking this as well when I read that sentence. Plain text emails are a pretty low bar in terms of technical challenges if one could submit Linux kernel patches.
- geofft 6y ago
  I'd love to send patches from my work account, but even when sending plaintext emails, Exchange, the MTA, does funny things to whitespace.
warrenq 6y ago
Ha Ha, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
Minor49er 6y ago
The gist of this is that a new OpenBSD contributor couldn't figure out how to open a text email with their current email client. It was set to use HTML messages only. So this developer had to install an entirely new client just to handle messages. Therefore, open source communications must change to use a new system of some sort, presumably like GitHub. The rest of the thread is rightfully criticizing the claim for its absurdity.
- smabie 6y ago
  You totally can configure Outlook (and every other mail client I assume) to use text emails.
  - manicdee 6y ago
    The problem is the way it comes out of the box. In Apple Mail you can "simply" open Preferences > Composing and set "Message Format" to "Plain Text". There is also the option for each message you write to Format > Make Plain Text But you have to know that the option exists before you can go looking for it.
- hyperrail 6y ago
  > The rest of the thread is rightfully criticizing the claim for its absurdity. When one reply to the thread says people who need HTML emails have nothing useful to say in their mails [1], and another reply says that mentioning the last name of Bill Gates will get your mail dropped by spam filters [2], I'm not sure which side(s) the absurdity is on. [1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847322304969&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847322304969&w=2 [2] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847734505942&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847734505942&w=2
  - Apaec 6y ago
    > Spam boxes are no longer very useful. Censorship is in full swing. If I were to mention the last name of the founder of Windows, this email would immediately go into the spam box of places like gmail. Is that true? Can anyone confirm?
lxe 6y ago
It would be nice to use something akin to Github... I don't care if it's SVN/Trac, Gitlab, or whatever -- mailing lists + patches have their limitations and there are better ways to organize OS development. It certainly isn't a 'war' though.
minedwiz 6y ago
Apparently Microsoft engineers can't hit the button in Outlook to turn the email to plain text.
- syntheticnature 6y ago
  At least in the past, on Outlook, that used to still munge attached patches to Windows line-ends instead of DOS, which was still a problem. That's Microsoft's fault, but if you are at some smaller shop trying to submit a patch, it can be a royal pain in the neck, especially if the admin is a Microsoft fan and only wants to run Exchange protocol.
jpollock 6y ago
Perhaps the ability to submit a patch in the required format is a fizzbuzz?
- smt88 6y ago
  > a fizzbuzz You mean a ceremonial hurdle that has absolutely no bearing on that person's worthiness to work on a particular project? Yes, it does sound like a fizzbuzz.
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    More like the absolute minimum one would expect any contributor to be able to produce. I'm not a fan of coding interviews, but being able to produce a functioning fizzbuzz should not be considered very difficult.
    - smt88 6y ago
      Something easy can suddenly be impossible when you're anxious or under pressure. If someone can't do fizzbuzz, they won't be able to do things that are actual signals of ability (like finish a side project or a take-home project).
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  Absolutely. Can you imagine the amount of completely useless and untested patches they would have to wade through if it was as simple as forking `torvalds/linux` on github and submitting a pull request? Maintainers would quickly learn to ignore patches from emails they don't recognize, and ultimately it would make it much harder for someone to break in. Sending the email to the correct list means directing it to the relevant subsystem maintainers. It's much more than just a patch submission method, it's a core part of their review process.
mastrsushi 6y ago
That's on Microsoft to come up with an alternative. A replacement would be like if plain Git was entirely replaced with a modern looking front end. You can have your pretty javascript applets, but please don't mess with the greybeards. Linux needs as many people as possible. Don't scare any of those people away.
syntheticnature 6y ago
This isn't exactly new, in terms of Microsoft email tools being a pain to use for submitting patches without HTML munging. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's been a problem for over a decade. The only new part here is them making suggestions. That said, from my experiences hosting email lists, that might indirectly be the higher bar to entry. So many providers' anti-spam policies basically treat discussion lists as spam, especially if you are so bold as to have multiple subscribers who use that one list. Gods forbid one of the users manages to delete their address or let it go stale without unsubscribing first and the list software lets a single email get bounced.
jcranmer 6y ago
There's a certain irony I found that some of the emails in the thread get mojibaked due to the mailing list server apparently not knowing how to indicate the charset properly.
emptyparadise 6y ago
Is there a GUI mail client that's preconfigured to work with mailing list and patch workflows?
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  mutt in an xterm works quite wonderfully.
neonate 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200827033621/https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159843434525592&w=2 https://web.archive.org/web/20200827033621/https://marc.info...
dang 6y ago
Url changed from https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159843434525592&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159843434525592&w=2, which points to this article. Edit: I decided to revert that switch. The article it points to is https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/? https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/?.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hyperrail 6y ago
The Register's original story [1] makes clear that the problem was not Microsoft's mail clients: > “It is a fairly specific workflow that is a challenge for some newer developers to engage with. As an example, my partner submitted a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client which didn’t mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so he could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.” > We assumed that Outlook was to blame. Could Microsoft fix that instead? “The question always is fix it to whose standards, because we are focused much more on business and enterprise models of clients and customers. For them we fixed it to a more HTML-based model so it really depends on who your audience is and who your target is.” > It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML,” she said. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
jzelinskie 6y ago
Since it was not previously mentioned, Sarah Novotny (while at Google) was on the original bootstrap committee that organized the Kubernetes ecosystem. This is by no means "Microsoft attacking Linux" or promoting GitHub; this is a personal critique from someone that has helped to create a more approachable, better organized, large scale project for the Linux Foundation already.
tehabe 6y ago
HTML in email is awful but sadly in most place it has won. In Apple Mail you can't attach pictures to plain text email w/o them being converted to HTML again. Gmail behaves completely different. And on Android you can't really deal with fixed lines of plain text emails. But what is even worse is, that most clients create extreme awful HTML, Outlook comes to mind. In a few version they put in the font-family "sans-serif" instead of sans-serif. Which meant the fall back would fail.
edent 6y ago
I agree. I wanted to make a minor change to the Linux kernel. Nothing more complicated than fixing a typo. Getting everything configured correctly was a pain. Finding out who to email for an unexpected hurdle. It took a bunch of emails back and forth until I got the format right. I did it, but it put me off contributing again. Would I have become a top-notch kernel developer if the process was easier? No. But I'd certainly have done some of the boring busy-work to fix minor issues. I appreciate the workflow is set in its ways. And it probably (intentionally?) prevents a lot of casual abuse of the process. But surely there's a better way to let new people contribute?
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  1. make change in git, commit it with a good message. 2. call ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f on the file you changed 3. call git send-email -1 --cover-letter --annotate and tell it where to send the patch. 4. done This is significantly easier than clicking a bunch of buttons on a slow Github or Gitlab instance.
  - lxe 6y ago
    This is easy indeed! But knowing is half the battle I guess... Most mainstream devs already "know" github/gitlab/etc, so having a process that supports people's existing workflow would be a good thing.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    You forgot `0. setup outbound mail`. Which may include figuring out how to setup a smartrelay. Which for some provider leads to explicitly enabling mail submission and generating a separate auth token for your email provider. Which you will need to learn about by searching multiple pages. Ah, and if you're in a corp environment, forget about sending anything out on port 25 - you'll need to figure out a proxy as well. If you're working with that project every day - sure, that's trivial. If you're sending a drive-by patch useful to others, it's really in the project's best interest to make it as easy as possible. In at least one case I ended up sending an email like "This is a patch, it's in public domain now, your change process is so annoying I'm not going to spend the next hour to set it up, KTHXBYE".
philliphaydon 6y ago
I can’t view that Marc site on mobile. I have to horizontal scroll text...
bakli 6y ago
The verge article paints a different picture, which I kind of agreed with (as someone who has grown as a developer in last 5-10 years). But then again, I haven't contributed to Linux so it might be a bad thing. FWIW, the problem with email clients seem to be with Google and Apple. My Outlook mail client handles the text email very well!
k_sze 6y ago
Would it help if mail clients can be configured with a list of e-mail addresses or domains that are known to prefer plain text, and then automatically warn the user and suggest to switch to plain text? Arguably such mail clients can come with a preconfigured, default list of well-known addresses or domains. That way the user doesn't have to go out of their way to find the plain-text/html switch. Another improvement is that mail clients implement a MarkDown or reStructuredText editing mode that will automatically generate a multipart message with both plain text and html parts. Is there any mail client like that out there?
rgoulter 6y ago
This was a nice post explaining git and email https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html and a website that looks nice. https://git-send-email.io/ https://git-send-email.io/ I'm curious if any sourcehut users here could explain more about sourcehut's code review tools. Do they make email-based code reviews easier?
papaf 6y ago
That's a barrier to entry that's pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor. I think that's actually a good thing. The person has to be interested enough to setup and learn about plain text email. Its not discrimination based on race, religion or gender identity but discrimination based on interest. Even simple barriers to entry have positive effects. I found that the quality of bug reports on Gitlab is much higher than on Github because everyone has a Github account and will happily spam a project with a lazy bug report (me included).
cV6WB 6y ago
But how could anyone possibly be productive without using Outlook? /s

72 points by dddddaviddddd 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Man, they are really getting aggressive with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish these days. High barrier to entry for Linux kernel patching seems like a feature, not a bug.

jonchang 6y ago

This should probably just be updated to point to The Register's article: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/

yodon 6y ago
From the register article: > It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML,” she said.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

How is this a "war" on plain text email? It is a true statement and it doesn't really sound like a huge corporate initiative, just a personal comment from one of the executives.

mfcl 6y ago

Surely if you want to patch the Linux kernel, then you can deal with text based emails?

drchiu 6y ago
I was just thinking this as well when I read that sentence. Plain text emails are a pretty low bar in terms of technical challenges if one could submit Linux kernel patches.
geofft 6y ago
I'd love to send patches from my work account, but even when sending plaintext emails, Exchange, the MTA, does funny things to whitespace.

warrenq 6y ago

Ha Ha, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."

Minor49er 6y ago

The gist of this is that a new OpenBSD contributor couldn't figure out how to open a text email with their current email client. It was set to use HTML messages only. So this developer had to install an entirely new client just to handle messages. Therefore, open source communications must change to use a new system of some sort, presumably like GitHub. The rest of the thread is rightfully criticizing the claim for its absurdity.

smabie 6y ago
You totally can configure Outlook (and every other mail client I assume) to use text emails.
- manicdee 6y ago
  The problem is the way it comes out of the box. In Apple Mail you can "simply" open Preferences > Composing and set "Message Format" to "Plain Text". There is also the option for each message you write to Format > Make Plain Text But you have to know that the option exists before you can go looking for it.
hyperrail 6y ago
> The rest of the thread is rightfully criticizing the claim for its absurdity. When one reply to the thread says people who need HTML emails have nothing useful to say in their mails [1], and another reply says that mentioning the last name of Bill Gates will get your mail dropped by spam filters [2], I'm not sure which side(s) the absurdity is on. [1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847322304969&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847322304969&w=2 [2] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847734505942&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159847734505942&w=2
- Apaec 6y ago
  > Spam boxes are no longer very useful. Censorship is in full swing. If I were to mention the last name of the founder of Windows, this email would immediately go into the spam box of places like gmail. Is that true? Can anyone confirm?

lxe 6y ago

It would be nice to use something akin to Github... I don't care if it's SVN/Trac, Gitlab, or whatever -- mailing lists + patches have their limitations and there are better ways to organize OS development. It certainly isn't a 'war' though.

minedwiz 6y ago

Apparently Microsoft engineers can't hit the button in Outlook to turn the email to plain text.

syntheticnature 6y ago
At least in the past, on Outlook, that used to still munge attached patches to Windows line-ends instead of DOS, which was still a problem. That's Microsoft's fault, but if you are at some smaller shop trying to submit a patch, it can be a royal pain in the neck, especially if the admin is a Microsoft fan and only wants to run Exchange protocol.

jpollock 6y ago

Perhaps the ability to submit a patch in the required format is a fizzbuzz?

smt88 6y ago
> a fizzbuzz You mean a ceremonial hurdle that has absolutely no bearing on that person's worthiness to work on a particular project? Yes, it does sound like a fizzbuzz.
- lokedhs 6y ago
  More like the absolute minimum one would expect any contributor to be able to produce. I'm not a fan of coding interviews, but being able to produce a functioning fizzbuzz should not be considered very difficult.
  - smt88 6y ago
    Something easy can suddenly be impossible when you're anxious or under pressure. If someone can't do fizzbuzz, they won't be able to do things that are actual signals of ability (like finish a side project or a take-home project).
nickysielicki 6y ago
Absolutely. Can you imagine the amount of completely useless and untested patches they would have to wade through if it was as simple as forking `torvalds/linux` on github and submitting a pull request? Maintainers would quickly learn to ignore patches from emails they don't recognize, and ultimately it would make it much harder for someone to break in. Sending the email to the correct list means directing it to the relevant subsystem maintainers. It's much more than just a patch submission method, it's a core part of their review process.

mastrsushi 6y ago

That's on Microsoft to come up with an alternative. A replacement would be like if plain Git was entirely replaced with a modern looking front end. You can have your pretty javascript applets, but please don't mess with the greybeards. Linux needs as many people as possible. Don't scare any of those people away.

syntheticnature 6y ago

This isn't exactly new, in terms of Microsoft email tools being a pain to use for submitting patches without HTML munging. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's been a problem for over a decade. The only new part here is them making suggestions. That said, from my experiences hosting email lists, that might indirectly be the higher bar to entry. So many providers' anti-spam policies basically treat discussion lists as spam, especially if you are so bold as to have multiple subscribers who use that one list. Gods forbid one of the users manages to delete their address or let it go stale without unsubscribing first and the list software lets a single email get bounced.

jcranmer 6y ago

There's a certain irony I found that some of the emails in the thread get mojibaked due to the mailing list server apparently not knowing how to indicate the charset properly.

emptyparadise 6y ago

Is there a GUI mail client that's preconfigured to work with mailing list and patch workflows?

jlgaddis 6y ago
mutt in an xterm works quite wonderfully.

neonate 6y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20200827033621/https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159843434525592&w=2 https://web.archive.org/web/20200827033621/https://marc.info...

dang 6y ago

Url changed from https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159843434525592&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159843434525592&w=2, which points to this article. Edit: I decided to revert that switch. The article it points to is https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/? https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/?.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hyperrail 6y ago

The Register's original story [1] makes clear that the problem was not Microsoft's mail clients: > “It is a fairly specific workflow that is a challenge for some newer developers to engage with. As an example, my partner submitted a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client which didn’t mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so he could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.” > We assumed that Outlook was to blame. Could Microsoft fix that instead? “The question always is fix it to whose standards, because we are focused much more on business and enterprise models of clients and customers. For them we fixed it to a more HTML-based model so it really depends on who your audience is and who your target is.” > It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML,” she said. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/

jzelinskie 6y ago

Since it was not previously mentioned, Sarah Novotny (while at Google) was on the original bootstrap committee that organized the Kubernetes ecosystem. This is by no means "Microsoft attacking Linux" or promoting GitHub; this is a personal critique from someone that has helped to create a more approachable, better organized, large scale project for the Linux Foundation already.

tehabe 6y ago

HTML in email is awful but sadly in most place it has won. In Apple Mail you can't attach pictures to plain text email w/o them being converted to HTML again. Gmail behaves completely different. And on Android you can't really deal with fixed lines of plain text emails. But what is even worse is, that most clients create extreme awful HTML, Outlook comes to mind. In a few version they put in the font-family "sans-serif" instead of sans-serif. Which meant the fall back would fail.

edent 6y ago

I agree. I wanted to make a minor change to the Linux kernel. Nothing more complicated than fixing a typo. Getting everything configured correctly was a pain. Finding out who to email for an unexpected hurdle. It took a bunch of emails back and forth until I got the format right. I did it, but it put me off contributing again. Would I have become a top-notch kernel developer if the process was easier? No. But I'd certainly have done some of the boring busy-work to fix minor issues. I appreciate the workflow is set in its ways. And it probably (intentionally?) prevents a lot of casual abuse of the process. But surely there's a better way to let new people contribute?

nickysielicki 6y ago
1. make change in git, commit it with a good message. 2. call ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f on the file you changed 3. call git send-email -1 --cover-letter --annotate and tell it where to send the patch. 4. done This is significantly easier than clicking a bunch of buttons on a slow Github or Gitlab instance.
- lxe 6y ago
  This is easy indeed! But knowing is half the battle I guess... Most mainstream devs already "know" github/gitlab/etc, so having a process that supports people's existing workflow would be a good thing.
- viraptor 6y ago
  You forgot `0. setup outbound mail`. Which may include figuring out how to setup a smartrelay. Which for some provider leads to explicitly enabling mail submission and generating a separate auth token for your email provider. Which you will need to learn about by searching multiple pages. Ah, and if you're in a corp environment, forget about sending anything out on port 25 - you'll need to figure out a proxy as well. If you're working with that project every day - sure, that's trivial. If you're sending a drive-by patch useful to others, it's really in the project's best interest to make it as easy as possible. In at least one case I ended up sending an email like "This is a patch, it's in public domain now, your change process is so annoying I'm not going to spend the next hour to set it up, KTHXBYE".

philliphaydon 6y ago

I can’t view that Marc site on mobile. I have to horizontal scroll text...

bakli 6y ago

The verge article paints a different picture, which I kind of agreed with (as someone who has grown as a developer in last 5-10 years). But then again, I haven't contributed to Linux so it might be a bad thing. FWIW, the problem with email clients seem to be with Google and Apple. My Outlook mail client handles the text email very well!

k_sze 6y ago

Would it help if mail clients can be configured with a list of e-mail addresses or domains that are known to prefer plain text, and then automatically warn the user and suggest to switch to plain text? Arguably such mail clients can come with a preconfigured, default list of well-known addresses or domains. That way the user doesn't have to go out of their way to find the plain-text/html switch. Another improvement is that mail clients implement a MarkDown or reStructuredText editing mode that will automatically generate a multipart message with both plain text and html parts. Is there any mail client like that out there?

rgoulter 6y ago

This was a nice post explaining git and email https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html and a website that looks nice. https://git-send-email.io/ https://git-send-email.io/ I'm curious if any sourcehut users here could explain more about sourcehut's code review tools. Do they make email-based code reviews easier?

papaf 6y ago

That's a barrier to entry that's pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor. I think that's actually a good thing. The person has to be interested enough to setup and learn about plain text email. Its not discrimination based on race, religion or gender identity but discrimination based on interest. Even simple barriers to entry have positive effects. I found that the quality of bug reports on Gitlab is much higher than on Github because everyone has a Github account and will happily spam a project with a lazy bug report (me included).

cV6WB 6y ago

But how could anyone possibly be productive without using Outlook? /s