[Mailman-Developers] Thinking about list footers

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Murray S. Kucherawy writes:

 > What's the expertise on the idea of adding footers in a new MIME text/plain
 > part rather than just bolting it onto the text as-is?  (Or is that already
 > done?)  What do MUAs generally do with multipart text/plain bodies?

As Mark and Barry point out, the MUAs-for-people-most-vulnerable-to-
email-fraud often handle them poorly.

Also, the last time partial signatures came up, it was pointed out
that there are *no* MUAs that differentiate between signed parts and
unsigned parts.  You don't get a warning when your eyes move from a
signed part to an unsigned part or vice-versa the way you do when
following a link from an HTTP URL to an HTTPS URL in a browser.  The
DKIM advocates have not liked the idea of signatures that don't apply
to the whole message at all.

 > And along those lines, do any MUAs do useful things with the
 > various List-* fields, other than permitting one to sort on them?

I think many do.  I had a proposal some years back that I discussed
with the Mozilla people.  The idea was to devise an algorithm for MUAs
that would get rid of Reply-To munging in most cases, and an optional
header field that would allow lists to express a preference.  They
thought it would be nice if someone would write up a document but
weren't much interested in helping or implementing, they thought their
products already did a good job.  There were some refinements but the
basic idea was

1.  If there is a Reply-To:, use that address, otherwise
2.  if there is a List-Post:, use that address, otherwise,
3.  reply to the address in From:.

The optional field (I even forget the name, it was something like
List-Prefer-Reply) allowed giving From: priority over List-Post:.

I'm pretty sure that Thunderbird, Mutt, and Emacs/Gnus implement
either a "smart" reply algorithm or or a reply-to-list function.
Other Emacs-based MUAs probably do, and it would be trivial to add in
most cases.  I don't know about KMail, Sylpheed, and Evolution.

On the other hand Windows and web-based MUAs didn't do much useful at
the time, and probably don't now, either.