[Mailman-Users] mails without MIME delimiter break when sent through mailman

[Jan Lausch]

Hi all,

thanks for your help, it is much appreciated.

Mark wrote:
> This is a pre-MIME uuencoded attachment.

Wow - ancient indeed. Must have been around the time i played text-based adventures in my local mailbox here. Whoops, memories coming up :-)


> However, I don't understand why adding msg_footer to the body would
> "break" the mail. Mailman should not be changing anything in the body
> between the begin and end delimiters so the uuencoded data chould be intact.


And here Stephen is completely correct in assuming:

> I would guess that some recipient MUA readded uuencode support only as
> a bug fix without really thinking about what they were doing, and it's
> only supported at the end of a message in the MIME trailer.


Mailman doesn't change anything in the body as such, however I get reports from multiple users that their MUAs do not show the picture as an attachment if there is a MIME object behind.
At least the following MUAs seem to be affected:
- Thunderbird 17.0.4
- Outlook 11
- Outlook 14

Outlook 14 (= MS Office 2010, if I remember correctly) is also the one producing the uuencoding.
Google revealed that this seems to be a known issue and does indeed happen with attachments to plaintext-mails if the respective switch in outlook is set.

So I will have that user correct his setting and all should be fine then.

The fact that this did not happen before migrating to the current mailman version could (in this light) be due to a possible re-installation or user clicking around in outlook stupidly.

That should solve my problem, thanks very much for your help and have a great weekend.

Jan

P.S.:

>> Yes, msg_footer can be empty and Mailman won't add anything.
> N.B. IIRC, it has to be *empty*, not blank.  Make sure there's no
> remnant of whitespace there, either.

Of course :-)