[Mailman-Users] Avoiding mangling in Mailman 3?

[Allan Hansen]

Stephen et al.,

You’re right that using links instead of a Reply function is unattractive and not how email is supposed to work. On the other hand, the same surely goes for the To: mangling:

I have set the ReplyTo: as the author, it’s not the immediate replying as such that is an issue, and the mangled string is factually correct. The issue comes when Apple Mail does auto-completion and hides the email address.

A mangled From: address like this:

"Allan Hansen (hansen at rc.org <mailto:hansen at rc.org>) via list" <rc at mail.rc.org <mailto:rc at mail.rc.org>>

will show up as 

‘Allan Hansen (hansen at rc.org <mailto:hansen at rc.org>) via list’ 

in Apple Mail with the address hidden by the mail client. Anyone sending to that string will assume that it goes to me. It does not. It goes to the list.

So putting “Allan Hansen (hansen AT rc.org <http://rc.org/>)" in the description will not help this issue. Using it with auto-completion will still send it to the hidden list address.

You’re right that if the author is sending HTML mail, adding a hyperlink to it is not likely to be successful at all. So maybe that’s not a good solution. On the other hand, if this is the case, it appears that the automatically inserted message footer added by Mailman is working fine (see next). Would anything prevent adding to this section? Can it be a REPLY button?

        ------------------------------------------------------
        Allan's mailing list
        allan at mail.rc.org <mailto:allan at mail.rc.org>	
	<http://mail.rc.org/mailman/listinfo/allan <http://mail.rc.org/mailman/listinfo/allan>>


I did the code change for the mangling long ago, on advice from this list. It worked for a while, until the auto-completion issue and hiding of the actual email addresses messed it up. I’d rather not have the same problems in Mailman 3, so I’m looking for something, anything - even if it’s not nice, that does not cause my subscribers to be confused or to send private messages to 1000 people without knowing it.

Yours,

	Allan



> On Dec 7, 2019, at 6:21 , Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
> 
> Allan Hansen writes:
> 
>> 1. Replace the From: address with a no-reply address on the list
>>   server. Don’t add the sender’s address in quotes.
> 
> I believe this requires a change in the Mailman code.
> 
> I guess you want the author's display name, if available, there?  What
> if there is no display name, or it doesn't identify the author?  I
> guess the best play would be the mailbox of the author.
> 
> I guess some nontechnical users
> might just copy that to an address field with less than amusing
> results, but it might be useful in manual lookups in address books,
> since most clients do not display Reply-To.
> 
>> 2. Keep the ‘Reply-To:’ address as the sender’s address (that’s
>>   what I have it set to now - I don’t want people to reply to the
>>   lists).
> 
> I believe this doesn't need a change to Mailman.
> 
>> 3. Put HTML mailto: links for ‘Reply to Sender’ and Reply to List’
>>   at the bottom of the message.
> 
> A mailto link for the list is configurable.  However, the link for
> author would require changes to Mailman code I'm pretty sure.  Also,
> as explained below, it's probably very unreliable and unattractive to
> try to use links to simulate a mail client's reply function.
> 
> First of all, users expect a reply function to copy the text of the
> original.  mailto URLs don't provide a facility for that.  We would
> have to add code to copy the text to the URL.  I'm not sure how
> typical clients would react to that, and if the original is plain
> text, the message's whole text would be visibly duplicated in the
> footer of the message distributed to subscribers, which would likely
> be displayed as is by most clients.  This would be pretty distressing
> to most subscribers, I think.  Also, I expect most clients use the DOM
> they have constructed to display the original mail to populate replies
> they construct themselves, but Mailman can't know about that.  Users
> may not be pleased with replies constructed from a mailto URL; in
> particular, it would not be displayed or transmitted as copied, but
> rather as original text.
> 
> Second, users expect replies to preserve threading.  This would mean
> adding References or at least In-Reply-To header fields to the mailto
> URLs.  This would be straightforward to implement, but would result in
> large, unreadable plaintext footers, if some users are sending
> plaintext mail.  (Though it wouldn't be as bad as if you tried to
> include the original text in the reply's composition window, I imagine
> you'd get complaints.)  Again, I'm not sure how typical clients would
> deal with it, whether they would follow the RFCs or screw up.
> 
> Third, if you mean "links as HTML" rather than "insert URLs
> somehow", this is rather problematic.  HTML mail is a minefield.
> There are standards, but in practice they're all violated by one
> client or another.  Manipulating HTML before forwarding to the
> subscribers is very likely to have bad side effects for some mail
> composed by some clients.
> 
> You're also not guaranteed that all the subscribers even use HTML
> mail, in which case even if added as HTML, in those messages you'd
> have all the ugliness described above.
> 
> Steve
>