Html headers & footers, unsubscribe
Hi guys,
I have had patches made for two issues:
HTML headers & footers handling
1 click list unsubscribe
You can get our patches here:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1121257&group_id=103&a tid=300103
Or also here:
http://tasdevil.com/mailman_developers.zip
Installation instructions are found in readme.txt
What we did:
- Reasonably good handling of HTML headers & footers
The issue we wanted to address is this one:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.039.htp
I wanted to be able to put html headers and footers into messages. I did not like the current mailman style of adding an attachment. I knew this must be possible to do because yahoo groups is doing it. So we spent a LOT of time testing how yahoo groups adds footers to mails. We tested multipart messages with varying numbers of attachments, badly formed html and a bunch of other stuff. We have documented our testing process in mime.txt.
Our implementation is about 95% perfect, and works identical to yahoo groups, which is sending millions of emails/day. It will correctly handle badly formed html, and various mimetypes. Sometimes, depending on the colors of a message, it will not be possible to view the headers & footers. Otherwise it works really well.
- 1-click unsubscribe with the URL under 60 characters.
I've been involved in some discussions on this topic on the developers list. The current unsubscribe process was not clear to me, and I wanted it to be very easy for my users. I also wanted the URLs to be short, so they would never get broken by various mail clients.
We made some small changes to encode the users email address and listnames to the footer, along with the user password. When a user wishes to unsubscribe, they click on the link, it passes this information to mailman, and a confirmation page is then shown. The user can choose to unsubscribe by clicking on the "yes, I want to unsubscribe" button.
I work with users who are less advanced than your average AOL customer, so both of these points were extremely important to solve. While many do feel its important to continue requiring passwords for mailman accounts, I would strongly advocate that those passwords become hidden just for access to archives.
I'd like to see mailman become capable of handling millions of messages/day, and it is only when simple unsubscribe functionality is incorporated that the resources will start to appear to make that possible.
Yes, this may represent some change, but I believe it can be done in a way which leaves everyone happy.
Anyways, those are our modifications. If you have code questions, all coding was done by Bushmanov Efim, who can be reached at binworkers@dcemail.com. He is available for more work of this kind if you need it, and I would highly recommend him as a great programmer. For other questions drop me a line.
Cheers,
Adrian
Adrian Bye wrote:
I wanted to be able to put html headers and footers into messages. I did not like the current mailman style of adding an attachment.
I have only looked briefly at the patches, but one problem I noticed is that the long description of msg_html_header in the patch to Mailman/Gui/NonDigest.py says "appended to the bottom" instead of "prepended to the top".
- 1-click unsubscribe with the URL under 60 characters.
<snip>
I work with users who are less advanced than your average AOL customer, ...
I suggest that while this 1-click unsubscribe may work well for you, it does not work well in general.
I have managed lists on Topica.com where every delivered message contains a footer with the address it was sent to and a 1-click unsubscribe link.
My experience as a Topica list manager and member of the LOD (list owner's discussion) list is:
These things do not substantially reduce the number of "unsubscribe me" messages sent to the list manager or the OP or posted to the list.
These things cause problems for users when a user forwards or replies to a message containing the footer without removing it and a subsequent recipient follows the 1-click unsubscribe out of curiosity, in a mistaken attempt to unsubscribe him/herself, maliciously or just to try to "teach" the user not to do that.
This occurs on Topica lists despite the fact that Topica removes the footer from incoming posts and even if the footer has been mangled so it is not recognizable as such and not removable, the 1-click unsubscribe URI is recognized and munged so it doesn't work.
If these 1-click unsubscribe links are not removed from replies to the list (your "less advanced than your average AOL customer" users won't remove them before replying), they are going to be widely available on your lists and people are going to be unsubscribed without their knowledge or consent.
Even if they are removed from list posts as in the Topica case, they are still available in off-list replies, Ccs and forwards and still cause problems.
I am not trying to denegrate the work you've done or your contribution back to the Mailman project. I think this is a fine example of how open source works. I'm only trying to point out that there can be a "dark side" to this feature.
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (2)
-
Adrian Bye -
Mark Sapiro