[Mailman-Users] Word attachments in archive?

[Richard Barrett]

At 02:44 03/04/2003, Rick Kuhn wrote:
>A list I belong to sends e-mails to members with attachments just fine, 
>but seems to convert the documents to undecipherial code embedded in the 
>message on the web archive. Is there a way to fix this?

I take it that you are running MM 2.0.x?

The "undecipherable code" is the encoded form of the attachment which is 
how attachments are actually transmitted as part of an email; the lines 
before the "undecipherable code" in the archived message tell you what form 
of encoding has been used. Effectively, the MM 2.0.x archive is showing you 
the body of what was actually sent out to the subscribers; typically the 
MUA of a subscriber is automatically converting the attachments in 
distributed mail back from their encoded-for-mail-transmission form to 
their original form.

The encoded attachment embedded in the message's archive page is of limited 
use to the average user. But you can extract the encoded attachment from 
the archive page's text and use command line tools on UNIX to decode such 
encoded attachments; the Python base64 module for instance.

You have some choices for handling attachments with MM internal archiver:

1. stick with MM 2.0.x and use the following patch to coerce archived mail 
to plain text, leaving an explanation of what is has done in place of the 
attachment, and hence remove the attachments from the archive altogether.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=300103&aid=413752&group_id=103

Note that if you use this patch and later upgrade MM 2.0.x to 2.1.1 you 
need to take an extra step to get clean conversion of your old lists  when 
doing the upgrade. There is a note about this in the MM 2.1.1 UPGRADING file.

2. upgrade to MM 2.1.1 which has the ability to extract attached files from 
archived mail, store them as separate files in the archive, and leave a 
links to those files in the body of the archived email. This is a much 
nicer solution in my view.

>Thanks,
>-R-
>
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