[Mailman-Users] Mailman Archive problems with opening attachments

[Mark Sapiro]

martin moriarty wrote:

>We're running mailman 2.1.5 successfully here. Weve a particular problem 
>with viewing attachments from arhives in a moderated list. I  can send 
>an attachment as moderator ( PDF ) to the list and its distributed 
>correctly after moderation. If however you go to view it from Archive 
>you get the following
>
>-------------- next part --------------
>
>Skipped content of type multipart/mixed 
>
>instead of the attachment, which is a problem for anyone joining the list late
>
>Tried sending the same attachment as another user other than the moderator , again it goes for moderation , is received fine, 
>but you receive the following:
>
>-------------- next part --------------
>A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
>Name: advert-dsystems-phds.pdf
>Type: application/pdf
>Size: 21837 bytes
>Desc: not available
>
>
>It does in this case give a url which you can eventually open the attachment, a bit messy.


The second behavior is the expected behavior. I don't know why it would
be different depending on who posts except perhaps different MUAs are
used resulting in a different MIME structure for the message.

I don't recall the details, but there have been scrubber issues in the
past that could result in the first behavior, but this really
shouldn't happen.


>Does anyone know if its possible to fix this behaviour so that you can view attachments from Archive. It did work for us last year. The
>attachments are being saved in the attachments subdirectory within mailman ok


Pipermail does not have the ability to archive Multipart messages at
all, not to mention the ability to convert a PDF attachment to HTML so
it could be viewed inline in the archive.

Thus, all messages must be 'scrubbed' before archiving. Scrubbing
consists of saving all non-plain text attachments and plain text parts
with incompatible character sets separately in the 'attachments'
directory and replacing them with hyperlinks in the original message
and flattening the original into a single plain text message for the
archive.

If there are problems with the current (2.1.9) scrubber, we would like
to get the details (a copy of the original problem message with all
headers and MIME structure intact) so we can fix the scrubber, but
messages to be archived by pipermail must be scrubbed to be
intelligible in the archive. The only way around this is to use a
different (external) archiver, but I don't think you are ever going to
be able to display PDF inline in an HTML page in a browser independent
way without converting it to HTML which defeats the entire purpose of
using PDF in the first place.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan