[Mailman-Developers] Headers and footers for MIME messages

[Andrew McNamara]

>I think mimelib is pretty good, certainly better than anything else
>I've seen for Python.  I've got some nits about its interface, which
>I'll need to clean up for any 1.0 release (or for inclusion in Python,
>and I know Guido has some nits).

I had a quick look a few weeks back - my impression was that it didn't
entirely embrace the OO'edness, although it can be a big mistake to go
too far with objects anyway, and I can't provide any sensible comments
on what you could do to make it more abstract (armchair critic). If it
works, that's the most important goal. 8-)

>Do you have a reference?  I gave up Perl almost 7 years ago, so I
>know I couldn't read it, but if the interface spec is online, I'd love
>to take a look.

It's the MIME::Tools module on cpan, I think this is the author's site
(and it includes online class doco):

   http://www.zeegee.com/code/perl/MIME-tools/

They also have a MIME::Lite.

>I agree.  Also, I've find that generating MIME correctly really
>requires holding the entire message hierarchy in memory and making
>several passes over the generated text before you can really start
>outputing correctly.  That sucks too.

This is definitely the biggest shortcoming with MIME - for things like
MTA's, there's a certain amount of presure to include MIME support
(encoding 8-bit messages when they encounter a 7 bit path, DSN, etc),
but the performance implications just suck too hard.

 ---
Andrew McNamara (System Architect)

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