[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Tanstaafl]

Hi guys,

I'm really excited about the developments ongoing with MM3... :)

One thing I'd really like to see in MM3 with respect to list digests is
what I'll call 'Interactive HTML Digests'. Yahoo 'full featured' digests
go about halfway to where I'd like to see MM3 go.

This was discussed briefly on the users list in the thread 'Replying to
digests' on 12/29...

Here's what I'm imagining:

1. Each message subject in the summary of messages at the top of the
   digest are embedded hyperlinks that if clicked, will scroll the
   digest down to that message (Yahoos do this now),

2. Each message displayed in the digest body would have the following
   in a single line at the very bottom *and* top of each message (Yahoos
   are only at the bottom):

  a) separate button/links for: 'Reply to Sender', 'Reply to List' and
     maybe 'Reply to all' (that last one could be optional?), and
  b) little 'Back to top' links to scroll back to the top of the message
     summary

3. When replying to a message, preserve the message subject *and* all of
   the individual message references so that replying to messages from
   the HTML digests doesn't break threading - basically so it looks as
   if it was replied to individually and separately, not from the list
   digest.

Apparently Yahoo's doesn't preserve the message header/references (bad),
but it does preserve the subject.

Also - I use Thunderbird, and when I click Yahoos 'Reply to Group', it
does 2 things wrong, but I don't know if MM could do anything about this
or if it would be a Thunderbird issue:

 1) it uses the email clients 'default account' instead of the account
    the user is in - so, if you just type something and click 'Send',
    it is sent from the wrong account and will bounce since the email
    address for that account is not a list/group member, and

 2) Thunderbird's new 'Quote only selected text' doesn't work - in fact,
    *nothing* is quoted. This issue is not as big as the first one,
    since it can be worked around by simply copying the highlighted
    text (more often than not I select text to quote rather than
    quoting the whole thing) then 'pasting as quote'. Two more steps -
    not that big a deal, but hey, if it can be coded to use the Clients
    features, all the better.

Since I'm not a programmer, all I can do is offer to help test/debug and
document this feature should you guys see any value in implementing it.

Thanks for listening... :)