When is a filing system not a filing system?

I have been doing my emailing with Plusnet’s webmail using the Chromium browser. Occasionally this does not work (loading, loading, … ) so I switch to using Firefox instead, and so far that has worked. But I have come across a strange difference in the way bookmarks work on the two browsers. It is quite straightforward to export the bookmarks from Chromium to an HTML file. But if you import that to Firefox instead of overwriting the current bookmarks it simply gives you two copies of what may already exist. In other words, the bookmark filing systems for the two browsers use quite different semantics for their objects.
In a sane filing system, attempting to load an object with the same name as a pre-existing object should bring up a dialog asking you whether to overwrite or cancel. This does not happen for Firefox. Be warned.

I would not recommend PlusNet’s webmail, to say its glacial is an underexaggeration. Of course we have great email clients on RISC OS, but if you are using something else you can get ThunderBird installed and half a dozen folders with filters set up, before webmail has finished refreshing.

Of course we have great email clients on RISC OS

Do we?

At the last count none of the RISC OS email clients supported receiving HTML formatted emails (however much they may be the spawn of Satan, the vast majority of auto-generated emails are now HTML formatted).

Anything email-wise on RISC OS actually supporting IMAP properly now?

Disclaimer – I abandoned RO many years back, but I do occasionally fire up an emulator, I also have an original Raspberry Pi with RISC OS installed which I used to transfer all my old data from ADFS hard drives. So there may be something now but back when I used the system regularly, one of the reasons for moving to something more modern was the complete lack of an IMAP mail client.

Messenger works fine with IMAP and HTML emails (most of them anyway).

It doesn’t do so well with text that is sent MIME encoded (as “modern” clients are wont to do), the usual result is completely missing newlines so everything is a single paragraph.

Mails sent using standard Android client, messed up.
Mails sent using K9 Mail, received okay.

At the last count none of the RISC OS email clients supported receiving HTML formatted emails

Messenger Pro does. The HTML is presented in the window as an attachment. If you choose to click on it, your chosen browser is invoked to display it. There’s no point in having two separate HTML rendering engines.

It may not be the way you expect or like (I don’t know), but to say no RO email client supports receiving HTML-formatted emails is untrue.

Pluto supports HTML formatted mails as well, in the same way as Messenger Pro does. However, sending HTML mails is not possible.

However, sending HTML mails is not possible.

Nor should it be! ;-)

In other words, the bookmark filing systems for the two browsers use quite different semantics for their objects.
In a sane filing system, attempting to load an object with the same name as a pre-existing object should bring up a dialog asking you whether to overwrite or cancel. This does not happen for Firefox. Be warned.

They don’t store bookmarks as separate files, it’s normally inserted in to an XML document, and its up to the program whether it overwrites existing bookmarks with the same name, or creates a new branch of the tree structure to put them in.

Messenger Pro does. The HTML is presented in the window as an attachment. If you choose to click on it, your chosen browser is invoked to display it. There’s no point in having two separate HTML rendering engines.

Pretty clunky. Thunderbird just displays it in the incoming message window.

It may not be the way you expect or like (I don’t know), but to say no RO email client supports receiving HTML-formatted emails is untrue.

Does the HTML-formatted message open in the incoming message window? No? Then the mail client doesn’t support it.

What you describe is just a MIME attachment that launches the HTML file in a web browser.

No, I don’t particularly like using HTML-formatted emails for general conversations. I’ve set Thunderbird to default to Plain Text. But people still send me HTML-formatted messages (Hotmail, GMail etc seem to use it by default with no way to turn it off) and most mailing lists use formatted emails.

So are you saying that, 22 years after I last checked, you still can’t open a formatted email (HTML and images) in the incoming message window of your email client on RISC OS?

you still can’t open a formatted email (HTML and images) in the incoming message window of your email client

And nor do we care that we can’t. HTML mail is the spawn of the deil.

So are you saying that, 22 years after I last checked, you still can’t open a formatted email (HTML and images) in the incoming message window of your email client on RISC OS?

Yes, and I’m happy with it like that. I think you’ll find others here feel the same way.

I repeat what I said above: there’s no point in having two separate HTML rendering engines.

My email service provider (which has no connection with RISC OS) offers a webmail service, which doesn’t automatically render HTML-formatted emails, so MPro isn’t alone.

Many HTML-formatted emails that I receive are deleted immediately, so I don’t have to wait for the downloading and rendering steps.

You’ll notice that RISC OS users seem stuck in 1998 or so.

While I fully agree that a plain text message should be sufficient, it’s a battle that was fought and lost decades ago. You’ll be hard pushed to find a mainstream mobile client that sends plain text as plain text. At the very least, it’ll be MIME encoded (which MPro will unpick with varying degrees of success), and it may even be base64 encoded.

Why? Well, the base64 encoding of a plain text message might seem pointless but it helps to reduce the number of characters that need to pass through mail systems (namely you can use the line ending of your choice and it’ll arrive as intended).
And the MIME encoding? Not just to allow hîgh-čhāråćtęrs, but also FОГЕIGИ ШФЯDS ¹ using other characters than the usual ASCII range. Because God forbid everybody else in the world suffer writing their messages in plain Latin-characters ASCII…

All of my mail clients do both. They don’t do “rich text” (HTML) as I’ve turned that off, but it does arrive as an encoded blob of gibberish.

It’s rather annoying, in 2022, to still run into people who are so enamoured by their much less capable software that they’d be like “Oh, yeah, that message didn’t make any sense so I deleted it, can you resend it in a readable format?”.
I don’t tend to reply, because if I did it probably wouldn’t be polite.

¹ I wonder how much of that was comprehensible to the average RISC OS user? You have Cyberbit, right? ;)

Thunderbird just displays it in the incoming message window.

It’s possible that Thunderbird links into whatever the default rendering engine is, and uses that to handle the display. It would be ludicrous to embed an entire rendering system into an email client. Yet another vector to have to keep up to date.

But people still send me HTML-formatted messages

Yup, bloody pain in the arse they are too. Great, the text size that looks good to you onscreen is unreadable on a mobile device… (it seems something offers fixed text sizes (like 12pt) in addition to the logical “bigger and smaller” (than the default size)).

the vast majority of auto-generated emails are now HTML formatted

Yeah, and the vast majority fail basic validation. So it’s not a surprise when I need to click on Reply in order to see the content of the message (as a quote) because the renderer, when handed the original, simply gave up.

Anything email-wise on RISC OS actually supporting IMAP properly now?

Hehe, I’ll have you know that iOS 7 (what’s on the iPad Mini) does not properly support IMAP. It insists upon downloading a copy of every message and storing it locally. As opposed to everything else (including iOS 6) which would buffer the past X days (usually about two weeks) locally and fetch the rest from the server if needed.

you still can’t open a formatted email (HTML and images) in the incoming message window of your email client

You shouldn’t ever anyway.
HTML, fine.
Embedded images, fine.
Image references to live sites? Never. This can be used for tracking.
Decent clients will not display images unless you permit it. Which, normally, you shouldn’t.

You’ll notice that RISC OS users seem stuck in 1998 or so.

Yup. Or even earlier.

As an aside… when Acorn released Browse back in 1996-97 or whenever it was, ok, it was the first browser to properly support PNG with alpha blending, but why oh why didn’t it support CSS? Remember that Browse was supposed to “fully support” HTML 4.01, but the Strict subset didn’t allow any inline formatting, relying entirely on CSS. Indeed CSS was part of the HTML 4.01 spec. Ah well.

It’s possible that Thunderbird links into whatever the default rendering engine is, and uses that to handle the display. It would be ludicrous to embed an entire rendering system into an email client. Yet another vector to have to keep up to date.

Thunderbird uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Mozilla Firefox. As for updating… for the last few years all Mozilla apps have installed an “update service” on the Windows versions which will fetch and install any updates automatically, even if the current user is non-admin.

(I’m running Windows 10 Pro on the desktop and Windows 11 Pro on the laptop, my normal account is ‘normal user’ and I elevate to administrator level if needed, similar to the ‘su’ command on *nix. Windows has actually been able to do this since XP, but it only worked properly from Vista onwards. Generally a Good Idea™ though, especially if you lock the rest of the system down.)

Hehe, I’ll have you know that iOS 7 (what’s on the iPad Mini) does not properly support IMAP. It insists upon downloading a copy of every message and storing it locally. As opposed to everything else (including iOS 6) which would buffer the past X days (usually about two weeks) locally and fetch the rest from the server if needed.

Sounds rather Apple-esque.

Thunderbird is configurable. On the desktop PC I’ve set it not to keep local copies of IMAP messages from the local mail server (other than the usual cache) but to store local copies from GMail. (The IMAP server is on the same network with a bit of gigabit Cat5e between the desktop PC and the server.)

On the laptop? I’ve set it to keep copies of everything locally. I could be out and about and still need to pick up emails. Offline mode in Thunderbird actually works rather well, and can detect when the system has connected to a wired or wireless network, at which point it automatically syncs all IMAP folders and sends any messages sat in the outbox.

I’m also loving the fact I can use the GMail calendar to keep everything in sync between the desktop, laptop and my Android phone. (The only Apple hardware I own is a 60GB iPod Video upgraded with a 128GB SSD, and an iPod Nano 8GB.)

Decent clients will not display images unless you permit it. Which, normally, you shouldn’t.

By default, Thunderbird won’t fetch any remote content in an HTML message unless you add the sender to your address book and enable the ‘show remote content’ option. (There’s a shortcut on a drop-down menu called ‘Always show remote content from [this sender]’ which basically does the same thing.)

But yes, definitely don’t fetch remote content by default.

And Rick, before you say it… yes, I’ve well and truly gone over to the Dark Side™ on the desktop. The servers are still running *nix though – NetBSD for the web / mail / file server (including Windows domain controller) and VortexBox (a highly customised Fedora distro) for the media server. I have no plans to Windows-ify the servers, just so long as the next release of NetBSD (10.0) supports POSIX ACLs, which means I can build and install Samba 4 in Active Directory domain controller mode.