[Mailman-Developers] 2 bugs, but I need a confirmation :-)

Barry A. Warsaw barry@digicool.com
Thu, 14 Dec 2000 22:54:10 -0500


>>>>> "TW" == Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> writes:

    TW> 1) Subscription-confirmation-response-emails to *-request,
    TW> with multiple attachements, fail. The problem is that Mailman
    TW> tries to interpret the MIME boundary and content-type headers
    TW> and what not as commands, rather than taking the first
    TW> attachement and parsing that. This wasn't a real problem when
    TW> I tested it on python-list, because my mailer doesn't put
    TW> enough headers in the first MIME part, but customers of ours
    TW> have seen honest problems with this. People mailing with HTML
    TW> mail enabled, for instance, but also people who get a
    TW> signature attached to the email, without being able to prevent
    TW> it. This enforced signature is becoming more and more populair
    TW> in clueless paranoid companies :P

The standard MIME parsing modules in Python suck.  I want to fix this
for 2.1, but haven't yet had time.  mimectl might be the way to go,
but I also think I want a DOM-like approach so I can slice and dice
MIME messages, then just say "okay, spit out the results".

    TW> 2) '\n.\n' screws up Mailman. This comes in two flavours :) If
    TW> the '\n.\n' sequence is late enough in the email, Mailman
    TW> doesn't notice, and the rest of the mail (including the
    TW> '\n.\n') silently vanishes. If the sequence is a bit higher,
    TW> Mailman does notice: sendmail stops the transmission while
    TW> Mailman still has data to send. Mailman considers the mail not
    TW> sent, and tries again later -- but the first part of the mail
    TW> is sent to all recipients just fine.

Hmm, a simplistic approach on my personal test lists, using a rather
stock Postfix doesn't seem to suffer from this.  I have a couple of
test lists floating around on various domains, although I think they
all use Postfix.  Thomas, I'll email you separately and you can try
some things out.

-Barry