[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tanstaafl writes:

 > Most MUAs can render HTML email messages fine.

That depends on your definitions of "HTML", "email messages", and
"fine".

All of them are pretty ambiguous, and different *senders* view them
differently.  That makes it very difficult for an application like
Mailman which often needs to manipulate the message to handle it.  For
example, at one time Outlook sent "HTML" mail that had tags encoded in
ASCII and content (including the occasional ALT attribute!) in little-
endian Unicode.  What in the world are you supposed to do with that?

True, that day is long gone, but it's still true that you really don't
know what is going to come down the pipe.

 > they aren't 'browsers', so whatever code that was used would have to be
 > an extremely limited subset that should work in most email clients
 > capable of rendering HTML emails.

The problem is that you can't restrict the original senders to that
extremely limited subset, and it's not Mailman's place to try to edit
at the HTML level, although manipulating MIME is something that it
is competent to do (and does).

 > > Works for me with Tbird 3.0.1 and Mailman MIME digests and "Reply" or
 > > "Reply All". "Reply List" is not offerred for a reply to a message
 > > from the MIME digest, because there is no List-Post: header in the
 > > individual message parts
 > 
 > I'm curious why? If I had received the message individually, there
 > would have been, so why not include them in messages in the digest?

That seems like a reasonable idea.  The only problem I can see is if
there was a prexisting List-Post.  For example, many announce lists
are subscribed to by a related discussion list.  In that case, the
right thing to do is to remove the announce list's List-Post and
substitute the discussion list's.  With an umbrella list (a list whose
only members are other lists) it would be the other way around: you
want the umbrella list's List-Post to remain.

I suspect this probably could be handled by the existing configuration
options in almost all cases.  The announce list usually doesn't need a
List-Post because the group of allowed posters is typically extremely
limited, and all know the address.  The sublists of an umbrella list
similarly have only one allowed poster -- the umbrella list -- so they
don't need the List-Post field (or any RFC 2369 headers for that
matter).

 > I hope you aren't suggesting that Mailman should limit its features to
 > the 'least common denominator'... I don't see anything wrong with
 > *optionally* supporting advanced features of modern mail clients.

I don't think you understand how primitive these features in fact
are.  Even something as simple as inserting the footer into the HTML
works for some clients but not for others.