[Mailman-Users] Personalised mails, content very depending on mail client

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Henrik Rasmussen writes:

 > Is there something I, as site admin, or the list-admins can do, to
 > get personalized HTML mails, even to Outlook users?

There is nothing you can do about the header/footer as admin.  Mailman
is not changing the mail since you can see the expected in GMail.  See
Mark's post for other aspects of personalization.

As sender, you can change the MIME structure of the email.  Why some
MUAs are happy with it but Outlook is not, you would best ask on an
Outlook channel.  One hint: If you are using Apple Mail, stop that.
Apple Mail uses a perfectly conforming MIME structure that makes it
difficult for some MUAs to extract attachments anyway, and would
probably aggravate this issue, too.  Specifically, it uses structure
like this:

    multipart/alternative
        text/plain
        multipart/related    # or something like that
            text/html        # refers to content-ids of inline MIME parts
            image/jpeg; content-id=1
            audio/mpeg-3; content-id=2

so that people who have text/plain-only MUAs (or settings) won't "see"
the attachments at all in many cases.

I'm not sure what wrapping that in a multipart/mixed:

    multipart/mixed              # Mailman wrapper for header/body/footer
        text/plain               # Mailman header text
        multipart/alternative
            text/plain
            multipart/related    # or something like that
                text/html        # refers to content-ids of attachments
                image/jpeg; content-id=1
                audio/mpeg-3; content-id=2
        text/plain               # Mailman footer text

should be interpreted as.  I know what *I* would do (display the text
parts like HTML <P> elements with some default style, and the HTML as
HTML), but Microsoft. *shrug*

Good luck, and may your next year have no Microsoft mail software in
it!

Steve