[pmwiki-users] RFC -- POP3 to PmWiki

Neil Herber nospam at eton.ca
Wed Oct 4 17:54:55 CDT 2006


At 2006-10-04  04:43 PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
>In particular, I want
>to be able to be able to send messages to pmwiki-users that
>contain content to be posted to the wiki.

Until I saw the line above, I was hard pressed to think of why I 
would want or need a mail to wiki gateway. It would great if someone 
could start a "use-case" page like the one for the comment/insert proposal.

But looking at my audiences, I can see plenty of pitfalls in having a 
generally available gateway:
1) most people use some form of HTML mail formatting which creates 
horrendous looking pages
2) mail clients handle things like inline graphics inconsistently, 
which makes it difficult to parse out the desired text
3) "but I didn't include any graphics" they say - forgetting about 
the backgrounds, banners and signature blocks they have on by default
4) I am trying to get people to jointly edit pages, not just bottom 
post to a page - for that I could use a bulletin board

I am not saying that a mail to wiki gateway wouldn't be a great thing 
- just noting that there are problems I can see with my audiences 
that would make it problematic for me.

A side illustration of oddball user behaviour: On one of the 
listserves I run, a footer is added to each email to identify the 
source (with a web link) and the footer currently finishes with these lines:

>Please remove this footer when replying to the list - otherwise 
>you'll end up with two
>If you end up with more than two, you'll look like a real dummy

The current record is five copies of the footer at the end of one exchange.


Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/ 





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