I'm surfacing for a moment to respond to some of the current issues, particularly the mime item, below. I only have a moment - i need to prepare some notes to instruct some other project and system folks around here in mailman setup, so they can give it a try for some of their lists (yay!)

On Sun, 26 Apr 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:

It looks like there may be a problem, or at least some sendmail (8.8.8) sensitivities, in the way that mailman is mime-encoding the digests. Does anyone have enough MIME acquaintance to have an immediate idea whether or not the current format is correct? In any case, i responded that i would look into the problem tomorrow, and plan to look into using the python distribution mime facilities - in particular mimify.py - to use known quantities for the encoding. Clues would be appreciated...

I should add, first of all, that i did suggest to them that they investigate whether sendmail 8.8.8 has any related sensitivities, since sendmail shouldn't be crashing, period, particularly from malformed content. John, i don't have any more details than the message provided, though i'll try to remember to ask them if they can provide any, when i contact them about the following change.

I've actually started to revamp the digest mechanism, to be able to refine the mime presentation in an easy way. I'll go into that below. For the meanwhile, i'm using mimetools.choose_boundary() to substitute for the boundary delimiter of the mime-format digests, in the hopes that this might avoid triggering the sendmail bug, and to provide a somewhat more robust primary delimiter besides.

What i'm planning to do (and have already started, in my enthusiasm) is to create a Digest class (in mm_message) to take all the digest pieces and keep them in a presentation-neutral format. It will be able to present them in both plain or mime formats. I'm planning to elaborate the mime format a bit, and to look into using a delimiter in the plain format which conforms to an old burstable-digest standard that was floating around the net.

The elaboration of the mime format has the whole message as a multipart/mixed type. The top section - the masthead - will have a few text/plain; charset=us-ascii sections:

• the digest header, if any
• admin info (addresses, URLs, etc)
• the toc

followed by the digest contents, as a multipart/digest section, with a simple boundary.

Finally there'll be a text/plain footer, if any. (I'm pretty close to convinced it's better to *not* have a default setting for the footer - a generic one is clutter, with info better served by the masthead admin-info section, and a list-specific one is up to the maillist admin.)

What do people think? This layout is used by a maillist to which i subscribe, and i like it. But i'm not sure what the conventional wisdom is about these things. (I will respond in a different message to john's conventional wisdom about having digests default to plain, instead of mime...)

Ken