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Date:      Sat, 29 Mar 2003 14:26:48 -0800
From:      Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>
To:        Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Weird messages 
Message-ID:  <20030329222648.5BDCD2A8BB@canning.wemm.org>
In-Reply-To: <3E85B19D.9060201@mac.com> 

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Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Peter Wemm wrote:
> [ ... ]
> > It looks like the mime support in mailman is just too smart for its own
> > good..  majordomo just blindly appended the trailer, but mailman is doing
> > it by adding a new mime section.   Eww.  Its perfectly valid mime, but
> > obviously the nesting is making things interesting to some mailers.
> 
> The general problem of appending stuff-- mailing list info, annoying 
> legal disclaimers :-), etc-- to email, and having the result be even 
> approximately correct when viewed by the wide variety of mail user 
> agents, is a lot harder than it may appear.  MIME-aware MUA's that 
> mishandle multipart content-types cause most of the difficulty.

Indeed.  But what majordomo did seemed to work.  I'll try making Mailman
smarter (ignore multipart/signed content) or simply doing a blind append
like majordomo has been doing for us for the last 8 years.

> Also, MailMan needs to be able to send to list members who prefer either 
> plain text or MIME formatted...

It is set to remove html.  Well, sort-of.  If a multipart/alternative
message arrives with just text/plan and text/html, then it'll strip the
html entirely.  If a multipart/alternative message has nothing but
a text/plain inside, then the multipart will be removed and leave just
the text/plain.  If a message has just got text/html after the strip-down,
then it'll use lynx to render a text-only representation of the html.

The control that it does give you though is for digests..  It'll generate
plain-text or mime style digests.  It doesn't really support per-user
preferences when in bulk mail mode like now, where it sends the same message
to all recipients.  If we switched to VERP mode or something, each person
would get their own personalized messages.  But that is a Big Deal on
resource consumption, so I'm not prepared to try that yet.

Cheers,
-Peter
--
Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5



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