On Sat, Apr 07, 2001 at 03:38:37PM -0400, Charlie Summers wrote:
>
> The question is not necessarily what do five-year-old standards have to
> say, but how is it being implimented _today,_ which brings me back to my
> request to see an issue or two of existing implimentations of the MIME type
> (which may be different from yours but equally, "follow[ing] the RFCs" based
> on a diferent intepretation of the request for comments mentioned) and
> comments from people who specifically do NOT use this MIME type.
Mailing list managers that appear to support multipart/digest include:
Sympa (Source: http://www.spi.ens.fr/sympa/sympa/node4.html)
Listproc 8.0 (Source: http://mlm.kentlaw.edu/)
CommuniGate Pro (Source: http://www.stalker.com/communigatepro/LIST.html)
EZMLM (Source: http://www.sumthin.nu/archives/ezmlm/May_1999/msg00028.html)
The IETF mandates the use of multipart/digest for its lists, fwiw.
(http://globecom.net/ietf/draft/draft-moore-maillist-req-01.html)
> I'm also _terribly_ interested in seeing how many different mail client
> packages work with the various implimentations, which is why I requested
> subscription information; I want to run samples of various implimentaitons
> through various clients and chart what happens.
One of my co-workers uses Pegasus for all his mail and absolutely
loves the way SmartList handles multipart/digest messages. I'm
told that Netscape Mail also handles them nicely, with an option
to view all digest attachments inline or as separate messages. Other
than those two, however, I haven't heard a lot of positive things
about multipart/digest in the clicky-clicky graphic mail clients.
> But considering the large number of
> digested email lists to which I'm subscribed do NOT use this type (the only
> one that does, out of all the lists to which I subscribe, is one of MINE
> implimented incorrectly according to the way I intepret the standards but
> correctly the way the author of Smartlist inteprets the standards, and
> differently from the way _you_ suggest the standard should be followed) and
Therein lie the risks of hewing blindly to standards. Just about
every specification is going to have holes in it, and some issues are
going to slip through the cracks. The issue isn't
whether the message format is "correct" in some abstract sense according
to the specification. It's whether people can actually read the messages.
There is an old discussion on the Internet Mail Consortium's site about
multipart/digest (http://www.imc.org/mailext/old-archive/index.html#351),
and the consensus among the implementors there appears to have been that
it is technically legal, but not a good idea, to include a text/plain
table of contents within a multipart/digest message.
