[Mailman-Users] Re: HTML mail

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 09 Nov 2000 00:44:06 -0500 
Bob Puff at NLE <bob at nleaudio.com> wrote:

> how are you making html digests with html posts, and yet stripping
> all the excess html junk from the text-only digests??  

I don't.  For those users that wish to use digests and who don't
wish to burst them before replying to them, well, that's their
problem.  As a list owner I don't have a whole lot of sympathy with
digest users.  Uncharitable to be sure, but outside of Outlook
users, digest users who post replies to digests rank well up on my
"annoying member class" list.

> That's exactly what I want to do, but all I've seen so far is to
> use the demime program ahead of Mailman, which makes everything
> plain text.

Which hardly seems a Bad Thing per se.

> negating the usefulness of the mime digests.  

Certainly not.  Correctly for MIME digests the individual
message/rfc822 parts should be the entire constituent messages
encluding all headers (I believe was fixed in v2 over v1.x's broken
behaviour (trimmed header sets)), ready to be burst back into their
individual messages exactly (and indistinguishably from) as if they
had been received individually.

> On another line: I have heard that Outlook makes the mime digests
> look like a ton of little attachments.  How do you fix this?

It does.  Arguably, and surprisingly given that this is Outlook,
this is acceptable behaviour.  The fact that Outlook has no facility
to burst digests of either RFC affiliation admittedly makes
something of a mockery of this small win.

> The mime digest puts a ton of header information in each message
> (that is stripped out of the plain text version).  

Yup.  This is as per the RFC.  How your MUA chooses to display (or
not) this information is a matter to take up with the sources of
your MUA.  For those interested, Exmh (my MUA of choice) display
message/rfc822 parts just fine, using the exact same logic it uses
to display the normal RFC 822 messages we tend to think of as
"email".

> This seems to be displayed fully in Eudora.  Can a lot of this
> junk be cut out?

Not while retaining compliance with the RFC.  I suggest you approach
the authors of Eudora in regard to improving their MIME supports.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
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--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--