Re: Dual content (text/plain and text/html) on xen-devel (was Re: Linux PV domU with >1 vCPU never resumes after xl save/restore)

[George Dunlap <gwd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2026 at 10:41 PM Jürgen Groß <jgross@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 05.08.26 14:15, George Dunlap wrote:
> > [Adding back in xen-devel, since this is relevant]
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 5, 2026 at 9:15 PM Jürgen Groß <jgross@xxxxxxxx
> > <mailto:jgross@xxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> >
> >     On 04.08.26 11:34, George Dunlap wrote:
> >      > On Tue, Aug 4, 2026 at 6:45 PM Jürgen Groß <jgross@xxxxxxxx
> >     <mailto:jgross@xxxxxxxx>
> >      > <mailto:jgross@xxxxxxxx <mailto:jgross@xxxxxxxx>>> wrote:
> >      >
> >      >
> >      >     P.S.: George, would it be possible to turn off HTML mails when 
> > sending to
> >      >             xen-devel?
> >      >
> >      >
> >      > I see both a text/plain part and a text/html part in the mail I sent;
> >     isn't the
> >      > presence of a text/plain version sufficient?
> >      >
> >      > Obviously sending patches is a different matter; but for that I'll be
> >     using git-
> >      > send-email.
> >
> >     This is a reply to your mail using Thunderbird (which I have configured 
> > to use
> >     plain text format as the default, in order to comply with most mailing 
> > lists
> >     I'm using).
> >
> >     I don't think Thunderbird is an exotic MUA, but please have a look how 
> > it
> >     rendered your HTML reply to my original mail. I can't see clearly which 
> > part
> >     was written by me originally and was cited by you in this mail.
> >
> >
> > Thanks, this is what I was looking for.
> >
> > Attached is the message Gmail sent.  As you can see, text/plain uses normal 
> > `>`
> > for quotes.
> >
> > That makes me think that the problem is in Thunderbird. It should either 
> > take
> > the text/plan part, and reply to that as though it were the only part it had
> > received; or it should take the HTML part, and convert the quotes to text
> > properly.  Replying in HTML and then rendering it with only space 
> > indentations
> > seems like a bug.
> >
> > Thunderbird certainly isn't exotic, but last time I used it it was 
> > definitely
> > under-maintained.
> >
> > You're asking every person who sends an email to xen-devel to remember to 
> > take
> > an action before sending the mail (or to send *all* mail as text/plain, 
> > even if
> > it's not to xen-devel), because your MUA isn't handling the standard 
> > properly.
>
> And you are asking every Thunderbird user to live with bad threading or to
> use a different mail client.

Right, but Gmail is following the convention correctly, using nested >
in plain text and nested <blockquote> in html; Thunderbird (it would
appear) is not following the convention, mis-rendering HTML blockquote
into text as spaces instead of > (or instead of just using the plain
text to reply to in the first place, rather than re-rendering the HTML
into text badly).

> > Is that really reasonable?  Couldn't you tell Thunderbird to ignore html and
> > only render text/plain?
>
> I did look for a setting controlling that, but couldn't find any. I'm already
> using to send plain text only. There seems to be no obvious control to prefer
> text over html in alternative bodies.
>
> On Matrix you stated you are using the same configuration for sending mails to
> xen-devel since 2006. I'm not sure this is true, as most mails I've received
> from you via xen-devel have been sent from your Citrix account, and those were
> all text-only.

The last email I sent to the list in 2024 was dual format:

https://marc.info/?l=xen-devel&m=171405222718671

Basically, if I was writing a new email, or replying to one that I was
cc'd on, I tended to use Apple Mail (and Thunderbird before that); but
if I was responding to an email that I wasn't cc'd on, I used Google.
Apple seems to have been configured to send text-only, while Gmail
generally sends dual-format unless I ask it not to for specific
messages.  (I've done so for this message, we'll see what it looks
like.)

 -George