[Mailman-Users] MIME digests problem?

[Mark Sapiro]

Rob Lingelbach wrote:

>could the following be directly related to the toggle between MIME digests and plain-text ones?


It almost certainly is.


>1) Yet I just looked at this particular user's celphone (Android) message queue, (he subscribes to the digest) and saw that the digests he's getting are empty attachments indicating 2k in length (I forced one out that is about 8 pages to test).


I use K-9 mail on an Android phone, and it's handling of MIME format
digests is a disaster. See
<http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/issues/detail?id=2017>. I think there
may be similar issues with the Android native mail client. I don't
know about iPhones.


>Then he also complained that on Earthlink's "Webmail" he gets his digests not with concatenated text like I'm used to seeing, but with no text in the message and instead, an "Attachments" header that lists each message (horizontally) as "Forwarded message"  "Forwarded message" etc.   (which when clicked, show the messages, supposedly).   He hates this of course.
>
>For what it's worth, he says Outlook exhibits the same behavior as Earthlink's Webmail.


So both Earthlink web mail and Outlook do not render a MIME digest very
well.


>So I'm wondering, has something changed in the way the RFCs are not being honored; are digests not 'homogenous' across platforms any more; is there a way to fix this behavior which may be affecting others?


Have your user switch to plain digests.

For a long time, Mailman digest subscribers have had a choice between
MIME format and 'plain' format digests. The MIME format digest is
fully conformant with the MIME RFCs, but not all MUAs deal with it
well. The plain format digest is (mostly) RFC 1153 compliant, but
compliance only matters to digest exploder software. Virtually all
MUAs should be able to properly render it, but non-plain text message
parts get replaced by short blurbs containing a URL to where they can
be found, and one can't directly reply to an individual message, at
least without an 'exploder'.

Thus, each user gets to choose which format better suits their needs.

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