[Mailman-Users] Re: MIME messages

[alex wetmore]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Joaquim Homrighausen wrote:
>  * On Wed, 06 Jun 2001 03:43:32 -0700, J C Lawrence wrote:
>
>  >> So, my question sort of remains the same I suppose.. is there a
>  >> way to get Mailman to handle this properly?
>
>  >The normal approach is to stick demime/mailfilter/stripmime in front
>  >of the Mailman aliases.
>
> Any reason why I would want to use one over the other?

Not really.  They have different implementations.  I wrote stripmime
when I couldn't find anything else, and I assume that the author of
demime did the same thing.  I haven't heard of mailfilter before.

One implmentation detail is that stripmime doesn't use any external
modules, while demime does.  Demime uses the CPAN Perl MIME modules,
which I wanted to avoid because they create temporary files or use
large in-memory buffers when processing large messages.  Stripmime
works one line at a time and never uses large chunks of memory.  On
the other hand the MIME parser that demime uses has been around longer
and might have fewer bugs.

A recent stripmime feature that I added is to convert HTML-only
messages into plaintext.  It doesn't always do a pretty job of the
conversion, but the conversion does work.  I don't know if demime has
this functionality.

http://www.phred.org/~alex/stripmime.html has information on
stripmime, and there is a link to demime at the bottom.  I've been
using it for over a year (50,000 or more messages have passed through
it on my system), so I'm pretty confident in the basic functionality.

alex