[Mailman-Users] Re: mailman/lynx HTML mail conversion bug

[John Swartzentruber]

On 6/4/2004 7:14 PM Chris Whip wrote:

>Hello, mailpersons.
>
>There is a bug in Mailman and/or Lynx regarding Hotmail/MSN rich text emails.
>(My setup: Mailman 2.1.5, Lynx version 2.8.4rel.1 (RH7.2, Sendmail 8.12.10))
>Replication instructions (that require only a telnet client) are included below.
>
>The Hotmail rich text editor shows up in the Hotmail mail editing facility
>for Internet Explorer/Windows users. It allows the generation of HTML mail
>with fonts, paragraphs, etc. When such a mail is sent to a Mailman list
>with HTML->text conversion set, such mails are sent out totally blank,
>and appear blank in archives. The following appears in logs/error:
>
>Jun 04 15:39:42 2004 (4122) HTML->text/plain error: 256
>
>This error message appears to be generated in Mailman/Handlers/MimeDel.py.
>The 256 appears to be the HTML->text conversion handler's returned error code.
>
>The handler is defined in Defaults.py or mm_cfg.py as follows:
>HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND = '/usr/bin/lynx -dump %(filename)s'
>
>When the handler is changed to /usr/bin/links, the problem does not occur,
>which points to lynx being the problem. But, if you meddle with the HTML
>content of the message, the problem continues to occur. This suggests that
>there is something strange about the way the message is presented to Lynx,
>rather than with the message itself.
>
>I would be interested to know if anyone else is using an alternative HTML->
>email conversion program. I could change over to Links, but I'm not sure
>how robust it is, either.
>
>Cheers,
>-- Chris Whip
>  
>

I think if you search the archives you'll find a solution. Here is what 
I have in my mm_cfg.py file, which would have been based on someone 
else's solution:

HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND = 'LYNX_TEMP_SPACE=/tmp /usr/bin/lynx 
-force_html -dump %(filename)s'

I think the key is setting the temp space.