BitFolk » Misc infrastructure

The existing email has a section like this:

## Your Maintenance Window(s) ## 

Your VPS has been assigned a maintenance window during which the reboots
will take place. The start of the maintenance window for your VPS is
listed below, in UTC time zone. Each maintenance window is up to 60
minutes long, though the work should be completed much sooner than this,
typically within about 15–20 minutes (yay, SSDs!).

+-----------------+---------------+--------------------+
| Name            | Main IPv4     | Window start (UTC) |
+-----------------+---------------+--------------------+
|     accountname |    85.119.x.y | 2021-08-25 01:45   |
+-----------------+---------------+--------------------+

If the table were instead like:

+-----------------+---------------+------------+--------------------+
| Name            | Main IPv4     | Hosted on  | Window start (UTC) |
+-----------------+---------------+------------+--------------------+
|     accountname | 85.119.x.y    | limoncello | 2021-08-25 01:45   |
+-----------------+---------------+------------+--------------------+

would this satisfy your request?

The above is 69 characters wide so should still fit okay in a plain text email ("limoncello" is currently the longest host name).

While we're here, the account name is currently right-aligned so perhaps the heading should be as well?

+-----------------+---------------+------------+--------------------+
|            Name | Main IPv4     | Hosted on  | Window start (UTC) |
+-----------------+---------------+------------+--------------------+
|     accountname | 85.119.x.y    | limoncello | 2021-08-25 01:45   |
+-----------------+---------------+------------+--------------------+

Possibly we could also use Unicode box-drawing characters and indicate that the email is utf8, but this may render incorrectly on broken mailers.

╭─────────────────┬───────────────┬────────────┬────────────────────╮
│            Name │ Main IPv4     │ Hosted on  │ Window start (UTC) │
├─────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────┤
│     accountname │ 85.119.x.y    │ limoncello │ 2021-08-25 01:45   │
╰─────────────────┴───────────────┴────────────┴────────────────────╯

Looks a bit wonky even in my web browser.

Came out quite nicely in my NeoMutt though!

I'd left-align name, both header and value, as the values aren't long
enough to have trouble matching a name to the rest of the row.

The IPv4 column needs to be slighter wider if three-digit bytes can
appear.

To stress the time is UTC, I'd put that first.

And then I'd copy the Bell Labs style of tables, seen in their many
books, and not box everything as it typically only adds clutter.
Emphasise the heading, separate columns only if it aids clarity.

So, rather than

╭─────────────────┬───────────────┬────────────┬────────────────────╮
│            Name │ Main IPv4     │ Hosted on  │ Window start (UTC) │
├─────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────┤
│     accountname │ 85.119.x.y    │ limoncello │ 2021-08-25 01:45   │
╰─────────────────┴───────────────┴────────────┴────────────────────╯

    ═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
     Name             Main IPv4       Hosted on   UTC start
    ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     accountname      85.119.123.123  limoncello  2021-08-25 01:45
     alongeraccount   85.119.123.123  limoncello  2021-08-25 02:15
    ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

    ═════════════════╤════════════════╤════════════╤══════════════════
     Name            │ Main IPv4      │ Hosted on  │ UTC start
    ─────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┼──────────────────
     accountname     │ 85.119.123.123 │ limoncello │ 2021-08-25 01:45
     alongeraccount  │ 85.119.123.123 │ limoncello │ 2021-08-25 02:15
    ─────────────────┴────────────────┴────────────┴──────────────────

Okay, I did that:

══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════                                                          
 Name             Main IPv4      Hosted on   UTC Window start                                                           
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 custdbpri        85.119.80.204  clockwork   2021-08-23 23:15
 ansible          85.119.80.196  clockwork   2021-08-23 23:15
 aptcacher0       85.119.80.253  hobgoblin   2021-08-24 00:15
 testpanel0       85.119.80.214  jack        2021-08-24 01:15
 bitweb0          85.119.80.199  jack        2021-08-24 01:15
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

…though hopefully we will not need it for a long time. 😀

Can you use tabs instead of spaces?
This looks weird (as does the old) on proportional fonts (e.g. Gmail)

Oh dear, I did wonder when this would be coming! In my day email was read in fixed width font, get off my lawn etc.

I guess there's more of this heresy than proper email now, so I probably should give in and send HTML email.

In the mean time yes I will try using tabs. Is it reasonable to assume that a tab is about 8 columns?

I just changed it to HTML. It now looks like this on gmail.