Message Body missing from Yahoo Mail users
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5c17855a523eb3b434d330830ad3b743.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hi All, I'm sorry if this was posted earlier, but I didn't see it in my searches through the archives.
It seems like every one of the members on my Mailman server who use Yahoo for their mail are missing the main body of the e-mail sent to the group. I am using Python 2.1.14 on a CentOS VPS. I have the list using a non-digest and digest options sent out as HTML.
My non-digest Header and Footer are both defined, and both come in just fine in a Yahoo e-mail. Again, the body (between header and footer) are missing from the e-mail.
I have also noticed this issue when I read the same e-mail on my own account which is hosted on the VPS if I read with SquirrelMail instead of using Roundcube. Is there anyway to fix this so that my Yahoo members can read the message bodies?
No other users on other e-mail providers have complained to me as of yet. Also - messages are in tact in the Archive's. They are in text form and have "html" stripped from the messages. Thank you for the help.
--
Phil / w2lie Monitor Long Island, Inc. | W2LIE.net | LongIslandFirePhotos.com
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Phil wrote:
I assume you mean the digests are MIME format as opposed to plain.
The MIME format digest contains each message in an individual, 'attached' message/rfc822 part. Depending on the exact MIME structure of the messages themselves, many web mail and phone clients do a horrible job of rendering these messages. This is a problem with the web mail application or the phone client. The digest sent by Mailman is completely compliant with section 5.1.5 of RFC 2046 <http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2046.txt>.
Yahoo mail should at least show a bunch of attachment links for the individual messages which could be downloaded and read, but this is not very satisfactory.
The options for Yahoo users are as follows:
Complain to Yahoo and wait (years?, centuries?, forever?) for them to fix it.
Switch to plain format digests which will contain the 'flattened' message text similar to what appears in the archive.
Subscribe to Yahoo Mail Plus to enable pop3 access to Yahoo mail and read mail with a MIME compliant mail client.
Subscribe to the digest with a non-Yahoo address.
Download messages of interest and read them locally.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5c17855a523eb3b434d330830ad3b743.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Mark, Thanks for the answer, but I'm having problems with *NON-Digest* users. I don't know if anything will change if those with NON-DIGEST issues convert to text only Digests.
As far as your reply about Digests and MIME, yes - I see issues when I read digests on my iphone. The message comes in fine when reading via Thunderbird, HORDE, SquirrelMail or RoundCube. At least that I can confirm it is a browser problem.
Thanks again Phil
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Phil wrote:
Sorry. I was distracted by your reference to "digest options sent out as HTML" and didn't fully comprehend your problem.
No, nothing will change if the non-digest members switch to 'plain'. The plain/MIME setting affects only digests and is irrelevant for non-digest members.
As far as the problem with individual messages sent to Yahoo members is concerned, This is still a Yahoo issue
The basic problem is that the post is not simple plain text (probably it is at least multipart/alternative, even after content filtering if any) so the msg_header and msg_footer can't simply be added to the message body, but have to be added as separate MIME parts and Yahoo mail is not doing a good job of rendering the resultant message.
This issue is discussed in some detail in the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/84A9>.
You may be able to avoid or mitigate the issue by not having a msg_header, but this may not be satisfactory for other reasons.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5c17855a523eb3b434d330830ad3b743.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
So as you said earlier, forcing my Yahoo users to select Digest only with plain text should get them around this problem?
My list only has a few members in this boat. And I need to have both header and footers so the older members and not so computer elite members understand they are part of a CC list and that the e-mails are not directed at them, but a group as a whole.
Thanks again for the info. Phil
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
--
Phil / w2lie Monitor Long Island, Inc. | W2LIE.net | LongIslandFirePhotos.com
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Phil wrote:
So as you said earlier, forcing my Yahoo users to select Digest only with plain text should get them around this problem?
I think so. At least then they will receive a digest with messages they can see rather than individual messages they can't see.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Mark Sapiro wrote:
As far as the problem with individual messages sent to Yahoo members is concerned, This is still a Yahoo issue
It is hard to believe how stupid Yahoo mail is about this. I just did a test. I sent a message with the MIME structure
multipart/mixed text/plain (message header) multipart/alternative text/plain (plain message body) text/html (html message body) text/plain (message footer)
to my yahoo.com address. Yahoo showed me the message header and the message footer and a single 'attachment' which was the message footer. No part of the message body was visible or accessible in Yahoo mail.
The really annoying part is that the HTML message body contained embedded images, and even though Yahoo mail did not display this part, it still displayed the "blocked remote images" message and did nothing when I clicked unblock.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Phil wrote:
I assume you mean the digests are MIME format as opposed to plain.
The MIME format digest contains each message in an individual, 'attached' message/rfc822 part. Depending on the exact MIME structure of the messages themselves, many web mail and phone clients do a horrible job of rendering these messages. This is a problem with the web mail application or the phone client. The digest sent by Mailman is completely compliant with section 5.1.5 of RFC 2046 <http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2046.txt>.
Yahoo mail should at least show a bunch of attachment links for the individual messages which could be downloaded and read, but this is not very satisfactory.
The options for Yahoo users are as follows:
Complain to Yahoo and wait (years?, centuries?, forever?) for them to fix it.
Switch to plain format digests which will contain the 'flattened' message text similar to what appears in the archive.
Subscribe to Yahoo Mail Plus to enable pop3 access to Yahoo mail and read mail with a MIME compliant mail client.
Subscribe to the digest with a non-Yahoo address.
Download messages of interest and read them locally.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5c17855a523eb3b434d330830ad3b743.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Mark, Thanks for the answer, but I'm having problems with *NON-Digest* users. I don't know if anything will change if those with NON-DIGEST issues convert to text only Digests.
As far as your reply about Digests and MIME, yes - I see issues when I read digests on my iphone. The message comes in fine when reading via Thunderbird, HORDE, SquirrelMail or RoundCube. At least that I can confirm it is a browser problem.
Thanks again Phil
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Phil wrote:
Sorry. I was distracted by your reference to "digest options sent out as HTML" and didn't fully comprehend your problem.
No, nothing will change if the non-digest members switch to 'plain'. The plain/MIME setting affects only digests and is irrelevant for non-digest members.
As far as the problem with individual messages sent to Yahoo members is concerned, This is still a Yahoo issue
The basic problem is that the post is not simple plain text (probably it is at least multipart/alternative, even after content filtering if any) so the msg_header and msg_footer can't simply be added to the message body, but have to be added as separate MIME parts and Yahoo mail is not doing a good job of rendering the resultant message.
This issue is discussed in some detail in the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/84A9>.
You may be able to avoid or mitigate the issue by not having a msg_header, but this may not be satisfactory for other reasons.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5c17855a523eb3b434d330830ad3b743.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
So as you said earlier, forcing my Yahoo users to select Digest only with plain text should get them around this problem?
My list only has a few members in this boat. And I need to have both header and footers so the older members and not so computer elite members understand they are part of a CC list and that the e-mails are not directed at them, but a group as a whole.
Thanks again for the info. Phil
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
--
Phil / w2lie Monitor Long Island, Inc. | W2LIE.net | LongIslandFirePhotos.com
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Phil wrote:
So as you said earlier, forcing my Yahoo users to select Digest only with plain text should get them around this problem?
I think so. At least then they will receive a digest with messages they can see rather than individual messages they can't see.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/56f108518d7ee2544412cc80978e3182.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Mark Sapiro wrote:
As far as the problem with individual messages sent to Yahoo members is concerned, This is still a Yahoo issue
It is hard to believe how stupid Yahoo mail is about this. I just did a test. I sent a message with the MIME structure
multipart/mixed text/plain (message header) multipart/alternative text/plain (plain message body) text/html (html message body) text/plain (message footer)
to my yahoo.com address. Yahoo showed me the message header and the message footer and a single 'attachment' which was the message footer. No part of the message body was visible or accessible in Yahoo mail.
The really annoying part is that the HTML message body contained embedded images, and even though Yahoo mail did not display this part, it still displayed the "blocked remote images" message and did nothing when I clicked unblock.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (2)
-
Mark Sapiro
-
Phil