[Mailman-Users] Re: Footer ?

Thu Aug 28 20:33:44 CEST 2003

Kevin McCann wrote:

>FWIW,I experience the same problem as jsmith and my preferred language
>setting is US English. I'm at mm 2.1.2, sendmail, RH 8.0). I have had to
>configure my lists to have no footers in outgoing mail. Otherwise,
>incoming messages with HTML cause the footer to be appended as an
>attachment in the messages sent to recipients. 
>

Yes, my message was in response to the example that jsmith posted, which 
was a message of type text/plain (not HTML).

I don't really see how it's possible to have Mailman add a footer to the 
bottom of HTML email, unless it parses the HTML and tries to add some 
text at what it thinks is the "bottom" of the rendered HTML.

Remember that HTML is structured, so if we directly append the footer 
after the HTML body, we get:

<html>
<body>
My Message Body
</body>
</html>

-- 
Mailman Footer Here

and the mailman footer will not even appear!  (It's outside of the HTML.)

It's possible to have Mailman try and parse HTML attachments and attempt 
to add the mailman footer before the </body> tag, but how can Mailman 
tell the difference between a HTML message, and an attachment that just 
happened to be HTML in this case?  We might end up adding Mailman 
footers to files that people attach to email that just happen to be of 
type HTML, with disastrous results.

If you have any suggestions as to how Mailman can safely append footers 
to HTML email, I'd love to hear any ideas!  This is obviously a problem 
that's been solved before, but to go whole-hog and parse all the HTML in 
every message to try and stick the footer in the right place seems to be 
a little heavy-weight to me.

Ben