Hello, mailpersons. There is a bug in Mailman and/or Lynx regarding Hotmail/MSN rich text emails. (My setup: Mailman 2.1.5, Lynx version 2.8.4rel.1 (RH7.2, Sendmail 8.12.10)) Replication instructions (that require only a telnet client) are included below.
The Hotmail rich text editor shows up in the Hotmail mail editing facility for Internet Explorer/Windows users. It allows the generation of HTML mail with fonts, paragraphs, etc. When such a mail is sent to a Mailman list with HTML->text conversion set, such mails are sent out totally blank, and appear blank in archives. The following appears in logs/error: Jun 04 15:39:42 2004 (4122) HTML->text/plain error: 256 This error message appears to be generated in Mailman/Handlers/MimeDel.py. The 256 appears to be the HTML->text conversion handler's returned error code. The handler is defined in Defaults.py or mm_cfg.py as follows: HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND = '/usr/bin/lynx -dump %(filename)s' When the handler is changed to /usr/bin/links, the problem does not occur, which points to lynx being the problem. But, if you meddle with the HTML content of the message, the problem continues to occur. This suggests that there is something strange about the way the message is presented to Lynx, rather than with the message itself. I would be interested to know if anyone else is using an alternative HTML-> email conversion program. I could change over to Links, but I'm not sure how robust it is, either. Cheers, -- Chris Whip Replication instructions, as promised: Telnet to your list server's port 25 Paste the following into the telnet session, after changing [EMAIL PROTECTED] to the email address of a list subscriber domain.com to that email address's domain name [EMAIL PROTECTED] to the email address of a test list with HTML->text conversion turned on helo domain.com mail from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] rcpt to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] data From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: testing rich text mail Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="richtext.html" <html><div style='background-color:'>Funky Rich Text email with .sig.<BR> <DIV>This is my <FONT color=#ff0099>hotmail</FONT> .sig. There are many like it but this one is <STRONG>mine</STRONG>. </DIV></div></html> . ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/