I host a list for about 700 autoharp musical enthusiasts on Mailman 2.1.12. The subscribers are by and large somewhat elderly and non techie, and to most of them an explanation of the difference between HTML-enhanced email and plain text email would be unintelligible geek-speak. I recently received the following email from one of the subscribers:
> "Scrubbed" messages as they appear in my cyberpluckers DIGESTS: > This type of problem is perhaps a bit over 6 months old, and evidently > is caused by the manner in which some people have tried to attach > their message to their cyberplucker posting. > > How can this problem be resolved? THANKS ... Drew Smith > ******************************************************* > > Message: 25 > Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2011 08:42:29 -0700 > From: "foo bar" <.......> > To: cyberpluck...@autoharp.org > Subject: Re: [CP] Intro > Message-ID: <a0ffed34-525e-40a5-88c6-4b78dbef2df8@blur> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > http://www.autoharp.org/mailman/blah/blah/..../attachment.html > > ... <snip> ... other examples I took a look at the list archive and indeed the email appears in the archives also with only a link to the attachment, which is the HTML-enhanced message, visible as HTML code. There's no plain text version in the archive. I explained to the subscriber, and to the list admins, that this (and similar) posts were probably HTML-only posts, and that, absent a plain text rendering in a multipart email, the list server had no way to generate a plain text version, and that including multiple HTML-enhanced emails in a digest was problematic and not going to work very well, if at all. The list admins are aware that plain text is the appropriate format for posting to a mailing list, but subscribers come and go from this list, and as I said, many don't understand such things, and it seems that there are a number of mail programs out there which will generate an HTML-enhanced email without an accompanying MIME text/plain version. The list is configured with mime_is_default_digest set to MIME, which I assume sends digests with each post as a separate attachment (I've never subscribed to the digest for this list, so I don't really know). I had assumed that this might address this problem, but apparently not. One of two things needs to happen. Either the list server should refuse and bounce posts with no MIME text/plain part, or some more intelligent configuration of Mailman needs to be available so that posts within a digest will render properly under these circumstances. Maybe a more recent version of Mailman can do this, I don't know. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I rather dislike HTML-enhanced email (to put it gently). There's no fixed standard for it, and what renders one way in one mail reader renders some other way in another mail reader, and it confuses the hell out of list servers. But people will use it, increasingly it seems, and insist on doing so, so somehow this kind of problem needs to be dealt with. -- Lindsay Haisley | "Real programmers use butterflies" FMP Computer Services | 512-259-1190 | - xkcd http://www.fmp.com | ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
