Hi,
I run a high volume list (around 80 messages per day), and we have complaints from digest users that the digests are difficult to work with. One requested feature is could the digests be in HTML format, and a link be presented in the table of contents to go to each message. Can this be done in Mailman by working with the digest templates?
Thanks. Andrew.
Andrew Hodgson writes:
No, it cannot be done without coding.
And it would not be easy. HTML does not provide a "mail message" element, so although it would be trivial to create the table of contents, there is no good way to indicate what is at the other end of those links.
So the approach would have to be to rip the messages into their component atoms and put them back together, with all the pieces either suppressed as "uninteresting" or reencapsulated in HTML for presentation. Images and attachments would have to be handled. In other words, somebody would have to write a web mail program.
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Andrew Hodgson writes:
I run a high volume list (around 80 messages per day), and we have > complaints from digest users that the digests are difficult to work > with. >One requested feature is could the digests be in HTML > format, and a link be presented in the table of contents to go to > each message. Can this >be done in Mailman by working with the > digest templates?
No, it cannot be done without coding.
And it would not be easy. HTML does not provide a "mail message" element, so although it would be trivial to create the table of contents, there is no good way to indicate what is at the other end of those links.
One of the examples I saw from another setup was to use in page links for each message in the TOC, so the links in the TOC just put the focus onto the next message. I realise there are still a lot of issues with that; my preferred option is to use MIME digests, but most users don't like them.
Thanks. Andrew.
Andrew Hodgson writes:
I don't understand what this means in terms of the link's href. It's definitely not a matter of "just" adding a link. Digests as sent by Mailman include whole messages, including all the normally hidden headers and the encoded attachments and MIME structure. This is straightforward to implement, you just insert a bit of separating material between messages. But there's nothing there for an href to hang its hat on. You could wrap the whole digest in HTML, insert
</pre><pre id="<MSG-ID>">
between messages and use 'href="<MSG-ID>"' in the ToC, but then the MUA would display all the headers and not decode any attachments. I'm sure your subscribers would riot if you did that to them!
So we're back to the original proposition: it cannot be done trivially.
--- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
I believe that what Andrew is really looking for is just something that could put in anchor links to the beginning of each message's test as the message is HTMLified. I agree that it would require code, but I don't think that code would need to have semantic knowledge of mail messages; it only needs to know where the edge of each message is.
It's possible there's enough syntactical information in a current RFC-format digest to get that done, and for all I know, there may be code out there to do it already.
The key question is: if there *is* something which can take an RFC formatted digest message, and convert it to multipart/mixed with an HTML body as Andrew's users desire... is there anyway to get Mailman to *call* that, in the digestifying process?
Cheers, -- jra
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274
On 12/16/2014 08:56 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Correct.
It is not possible to do this at all for the plain text format digest since by definition, that contains no HTML.
For the MIME format digest, I think Stephen is correct. The MIME digest currently has the following structure
multipart/mixed text/plain (the boilerplate) text/plain (the digest_header if any) text/plain (the TOC) multipart/digest message/rfc822 (the first message) message/rfc822 (the next message) text/plain (the digest_footer if any)
One would have to create the TOC as text/html rather than text/plain and add links to the various message parts. These can't be anchor tags. Do do that would require HTMLifying the entire digest. They could probably be RFC2393 mid: references though. That might not be too difficult to do, although various popular web mail clients, e.g. gmail, currently don't make it possible to open an individual digest message as a separate message, so how they would deal with such a digest is unknown.
I might experiment with this at some point, but I am not optimistic that a format can be created that would work with all the freemail clients.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro wrote:
Andrew Hodgson writes:
No, it cannot be done without coding.
Correct.
I pretty much thought as much, but wanted to check anyway.
That was exactly what I was looking for, just didn't say it as well.
It is not possible to do this at all for the plain text format digest since by definition, that contains no HTML.
I wouldn't look to do it for the plain text version, some users may not want this at all so would stick to the plain text version. You could possibly look into creating a different digest type such as HTML indexed or similar, but I would see it as a completely different digest type.
For the MIME format digest, I think Stephen is correct. The MIME digest currently has the following structure
One would have to create the TOC as text/html rather than text/plain and add links to the various message parts. These can't be anchor tags. Do do that would require HTMLifying the entire digest. They could probably be >RFC2393 mid: references though. That might not be too difficult to do, although various popular web mail clients, e.g. gmail, currently don't make it possible to open an individual digest message as a separate message, so how >they would deal with such a digest is unknown.
I don't believe you would need each message as separate MIME parts. For reference I am going to copy out a template an admin of another list sent me - they are using Sympa. This is a template they use for doing exactly the same thing. I don't know anything about Sympa, but I think the template will give you a slightly better idea of what I am looking for.
Thanks. Andrew.
---cut here---
We worked on a new version of the digest plain.
You should try this template on a test list.
From: [% fromlist %] To: [% to %] Reply-to: [% replyto %] Subject: [% FILTER qencode %][%|loc(list.name,date)%]%1 Digest %2[%END%] [% IF total_group > 1 -%]([% current_group %]/[% total_group %])[% END %][%END%] Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="[% boundary1 %]"
--[% boundary1 %] Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"; Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
[%|loc(list.name,date)%]%1 Digest %2[%END%]
<br>
[%|loc%]Table of contents:[%END%]
<ul> [% FOREACH m = msg_list -%] <li><a name="N0"><a href="#N[% m.id %]">[% m.id %] - [% m.subject %]</a> - [% m.from %] </li> [% END %] </ul> <hr color="#0000ff">
[% FOREACH m = msg_list -%] <p></b><a name="N[% m.id %]">[% m.id %] -</a> Date: [% m.date %] Author: [% m.from %] <br> Subject: <b><font color="#0000ff"> [% m.subject %] </b></font><br>
[% m.plain_body %]
<br> <table align="center"> <tr> <td><a href="mailto: [% m.from %]?Subject= [% m.subject %] "> Answer to author</a></td> <td> <--> </td> <td><a href="mailto: [% replyto %]?Subject= [% m.subject %] "> Answer to list</a></td> <td> <--> </td> <td><a href="#N0">Back to table of content</a></td> </tr> </table> <hr color="#0000ff"></font>
[% END %]
<br> [%|loc(list.name,date)%]End of %1 Digest %2[%END%] <br>
</body></html>
--[% boundary1 %]--
On 12/16/2014 11:14 AM, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
I don't believe you would need each message as separate MIME parts. For reference I am going to copy out a template an admin of another list sent me - they are using Sympa. This is a template they use for doing exactly the same thing. I don't know anything about Sympa, but I think the template will give you a slightly better idea of what I am looking for.
So what you are really looking for is a third digest format which is essentially the current plain text digest, but HTMLified to the extent that the TOC contains tags like <a href="#msg1">Subject 1</a> ... and each message is preceded with a tag like <a name="msg1"> ... and the rest of the digest outside of those is perhaps surrounded by <pre> ... </pre> and a HEAD section with something like
<style type="text/css"> pre { white-space: pre-wrap; } </style>
to let long lines wrap to the window width.
This is probably doable without too much effort, but I have no plan to do it. The side effects of adding a third digest format are messy.
If someone wanted to replace the current plain text digest for their own list or site, say by making a site or list specific version of the ToDigest handler, I don't think it would be two difficult, but there are standards (RFC 1153 for plain digests, RFC 2046 for MIME digests) that govern the format of these digest types. Thus, I wouldn't hijack one of the two existing digest types for this new type.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Andrew Hodgson writes:
I thought you said your users hate MIME digests?
[% m.plain_body %]
I suspect this means "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce": images and attachments give us indigestion. Maybe no HTML, either.
Note that this template actually contains code which is interpreted by the digesting engine, and as-is it probably is broken for foreign languages.
On 12/16/2014 10:25 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
There's a typo above. The correct RFC is RFC2392.
That notwithstanding, I tried taking a normal MIME digest and changing the Content-Type of the TOC part from text/plain to text/html and changing the actual raw TOC from:
Today's Topics:
- Subject 1 (Author)
- Subject 2 (Author)
- Subject 3 (Author)
- Subject 4 (Author) ...
to:
Today's Topics: <ol> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 1 (Author)</a> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 2 (Author)</a> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 3 (Author)</a> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 4 (Author)</a> ... </ol>
where "mid:..." referenced the actual Message-IDs of the messages. I then opened that message with Thunderbird and it presented a nice looking TOC with links, but when I clicked one, it asked me for an application to handle the mid: URL scheme.
I then tried adding Content-ID: headers to the messages and referencing those with cid:... URLs. This time Thunderbird at least understood what cid: was, but hovering over the link showed the target as 'about:blank' and clicking it went nowhere.
I didn't bother trying any other MUAs, but I conclude that this approach, while easy to implement and still producing an RFC 2046 compliant message, is only going to be of benefit with limited if any MUAs.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Would it work better for them if you adjusted digest_size_threshhold so they receive digests with fewer messages? I've never used this setting, so I'm assuming it will send more than one a day if enough messages arrive.
Unfortunately the setting is for the size of the digest in KB, not the number of messages in it, but it might work if the size of the messages doesn't vary much.
If you keep archives, another alternative might be to create a script to send daily archive links to them. They'd have to work out which messages were new, but it might work for them.
Peter Shute
On Tue, 16 Dec 2014, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
I am subscribed in MIME digest mode to all lists which support them. I find they are a great way to receive messages once per day (more or less) without being pestered by single messages as they come.
Good mail user agents (MUAs) should have a way to deal with MIME digests internally. I am not familiar (nor comfortable) with "modern" MUAs (GUI-driven), since I use good old alpine.
The default way of alpine to deal with digests is slightly awkward. One presses V to View the digest index (which is not in a nice shape to read, I admit), then moves the current line on one of the RFC/822 items, and clicks, and accesses the individual message as a normal mail.
My way uses a custom key (D) to which I assigned the execution of a one-liner script which contains
formail +1 -ds >! ~/mail/temporary
this splits the digest into a mail folder. The same key then goes to the index of the folder, so one can access each message as if it were a normal mail.
I presume all good MUAs should have a way to deal with MIME digests, it is just a matter for the user to find it. If you can find it for the most common MUAs used by your users, then you could write instructions in a FAQ
--
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy) For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
Do not like Firefox >=29 ? Get Pale Moon ! http://www.palemoon.org
On Wed, 17 Dec 2014, Peter Shute wrote:
So you have found a way to bypass the digest and pestering me ! :-)
this splits the digest into a mail folder.
technically speaking, "on arrival" pertains to a mail delivery agent, and not to a MUA, which may operate when first entered by the user.
Perhaps it is possible to use Alpine "filter rules", but I never tried them and am not familiar with them.
On the other hand formail is part of procmail, which IS a delivery agent (actually on my SuSE it is the default delivery agent of sendmail). Any "filtering on arrival" can be more or less easily done with procmail. I do an extensive use of it http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/Procmail/
So you could do what you propose straight with procmail !
It is mainly a matter of user preferences (YMMV ?)
I do divert some specific messages to specific folders, seminar announcements for one, and different level of spam for another.
Concerning mailing lists, I consider them of a more transient nature, I am not interested in keeping their messages "forever". So the MIME digest mechanism is fine insofar I want to receive all messages of the day at one moment. Then I usually look at the list of messages (almost all digests I know, notably the ones generated by mailman, have a list of subjects close to the top) ... if I see no subjects which interest me I just delete the entire digest. If I see something interesting, I press D, expand in a temporary folder, read the messages and reply to or archive the few really interesting ones.
I actually do use procmail on mailing lists to divert their messages (which usually are entire digests) to a specific folder when on vacation. We can have pretty long vacations in this country :-)
I have divided the lists I am subscribed to in two categories and so have just two folders, one per category.
For the less interesting lists, when I am away I divert them to /dev/null.
For the most interesting lsits, I divert them to a cumulative folder, so I can read them when I am back.
This way my INBOX is not cluttered with mailing list messages, but only with messages from invididuals. This makes easy to sort the backlog when I return. Or to access the INBOX via a webmailer (which I may do once or twice per vacation period ... I am not the type which needs to be permanently connected :-))
--
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy) For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
Do not like Firefox >=29 ? Get Pale Moon ! http://www.palemoon.org
Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
Yes. I've done it at the MDA with gmail, Exchange and I think Yahoo. I used to do it in the MUA when I used Outlook Express. That works ok if you're only reading email with one device.
You are a very sophisticated digests user. Perhaps there are sophisticated digest users on our list, but we also have plenty of unsophisticated ones, who demand that other list members don't clutter their digests with things they aren't interested in.
They create problems when they reply by constructing the reply by hand with a different subject line, or by simply replying to the digest email, with unchanged subject line and quoting the digest in full. The only reason they use digest mode in the first place is because they don't know how to create message rules to keep their Inbox clear of list mail.
You can probably tell I don't like digest mode at all. I'd rather encourage people to learn how to use message rules.
I have divided the lists I am subscribed to in two categories and so have just two folders, one per category.
Personally I move all list mail to a folder per list. I've never thought of mixing mail from different lists, but that is an idea worth thinking about. It would simplify things greatly.
Peter Shute
Peter Shute writes:
Yes, it's a shame that to be a popular MUA you have to suck. None of the above are necessary concommittents of digest mode. They happen because things that the MUA could deal with with only a tiny bit of thought on the part of the programmer are ignored in favor of tweaking the gradients used on the buttons.
Digest messages would actually be a better workflow for your users if the MUAs bothered to implement:
1. Display digest messages in the summary as single messages.
2. If the user clicks on the digest message, it is opened as a
folder, not as a message.This is *such* a no-brainer, and it shouldn't be hard to do (as implementing MUA features goes) since most MUAs already have to deal with both mbox imports (very similar to "plain" digests) and MIME structure.
Message rules OTOH are a serious cognitive burden, even on experienced users. At least for me, several of my "communities" overlap, and my employer has turned into my most unruly source of "spam" (not to mention the fact that a lot of *real* spam gets accepted by its mailing lists!) GMail's "filter mail like this" feature does a *very* poor job of creating usable filters for them. Especially, it doesn't seem to know about how to determine that mail is forwarded through a list (and so "mail like this" should use "List-ID" and "List-Post", not "From" or "Subject")
If that's a common experience, it means that users need to learn how "author" is defined (which, especially with DMARC From-munging and Outlook's "on behalf of" mistreatment of Mailman mail, is often hardly intuitive to the average user), how to properly specify list tags in Subject, and so on.
I don't disagree with you that with current popular MUAs, you'd be better off with your users learning how to use rules, but really, digest mode *should* be a feature. :-(
As I said before, Alpine can do that or be instructed to do that. I hope it is allowed to post a few screendumps to demonstrate
The mailindex.png shows part of my MUA index screen. The last message numbered 34 is a digest from this mailing list.
- If I click on it, it will open the entire digest as a single message
- If I then give command V it will show the screen in maildigest.png, i.e. "attachment index"
This is default action. The "attachment index" is not very perspicuous but if you click on any of the entries numberd 3,n and labelled "Message/RFC822" you will open the corresponding e-mail message.
This satisfies your item 1 in three clicks
Instead if you start from the MUA index screen, select message 34 with the cursor and type shift-D, you are prompted for a folder collection/ folder name (it proposes the folder name "temporary" so if you agree and do not have to change the folder collection where it is located, just just press return, and you get a folder index screen like the third attachment maildigestindex.png
This satisfies your item 2 in a min of 2 clicks. However it is not standard behaviour, it is my personal customization. I had to play with programmable keys and write a one-liner external script to support it.
But ... yes, you can :-)
--
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy) For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
Do not like Firefox >=29 ? Get Pale Moon ! http://www.palemoon.org
Lucio Chiappetti writes:
I hope it is allowed to post a few screendumps to demonstrate
Unfortunately, Mailman @python.org doesn't pass those, and they don't get into mail-archive.com because it's subscribed by mail, not direct from the Mailman daemon.
This satisfies your item 1 in three clicks This satisfies your item 2 in a min of 2 clicks.
Actually, most Emacs-based MUAs are able to treat digests as folders by default. No customizations required.
The ones I've used are also able to "explode" digests into single messages. But for most purposes treating them as folders is more convenient.
On Fri, 19 Dec 2014, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
OK, should be here (do not know why first got a different name)
http://i62.tinypic.com/2l94j5s.png http://tinypic.com/r/syv5mu/8 http://tinypic.com/r/33ykoyc/8
Actually, most Emacs-based MUAs are able to treat digests as folders by default. No customizations required.
Then you are beyond my mark, and possibly both about average user.
Lucio Chiappetti writes:
Not really. My primary MUA is VM, which presents a rather simple menubar & toolbar interface to the average user. However, a lot of intelligent/sophisticated/too-smart-for-their-own-good/too-much-free- time-on-their-hands hackers have tweaked things so that most actions do something sensible most of the time. (Of course, if you want to it's easy enough to access the more advanced features via keyboard.)
The big problem with Emacs-based MUAs is that it's way too easy to escape into Emacs itself and never find your way back to the safety of the WIMP-y MUA. :-)
and possibly both about average user.
Yeah, that's why I didn't suggest asking them to get real MUAs.
On 12/16/2014 6:40 AM, Andrew Hodgson <andrew@hodgsonfamily.org> wrote:
See this thread from back in 2010 when I asked for the very same thing, but in much more detail:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2010-February/020958.ht...
Andrew Hodgson writes:
No, it cannot be done without coding.
And it would not be easy. HTML does not provide a "mail message" element, so although it would be trivial to create the table of contents, there is no good way to indicate what is at the other end of those links.
So the approach would have to be to rip the messages into their component atoms and put them back together, with all the pieces either suppressed as "uninteresting" or reencapsulated in HTML for presentation. Images and attachments would have to be handled. In other words, somebody would have to write a web mail program.
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Andrew Hodgson writes:
I run a high volume list (around 80 messages per day), and we have > complaints from digest users that the digests are difficult to work > with. >One requested feature is could the digests be in HTML > format, and a link be presented in the table of contents to go to > each message. Can this >be done in Mailman by working with the > digest templates?
No, it cannot be done without coding.
And it would not be easy. HTML does not provide a "mail message" element, so although it would be trivial to create the table of contents, there is no good way to indicate what is at the other end of those links.
One of the examples I saw from another setup was to use in page links for each message in the TOC, so the links in the TOC just put the focus onto the next message. I realise there are still a lot of issues with that; my preferred option is to use MIME digests, but most users don't like them.
Thanks. Andrew.
Andrew Hodgson writes:
I don't understand what this means in terms of the link's href. It's definitely not a matter of "just" adding a link. Digests as sent by Mailman include whole messages, including all the normally hidden headers and the encoded attachments and MIME structure. This is straightforward to implement, you just insert a bit of separating material between messages. But there's nothing there for an href to hang its hat on. You could wrap the whole digest in HTML, insert
</pre><pre id="<MSG-ID>">
between messages and use 'href="<MSG-ID>"' in the ToC, but then the MUA would display all the headers and not decode any attachments. I'm sure your subscribers would riot if you did that to them!
So we're back to the original proposition: it cannot be done trivially.
--- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
I believe that what Andrew is really looking for is just something that could put in anchor links to the beginning of each message's test as the message is HTMLified. I agree that it would require code, but I don't think that code would need to have semantic knowledge of mail messages; it only needs to know where the edge of each message is.
It's possible there's enough syntactical information in a current RFC-format digest to get that done, and for all I know, there may be code out there to do it already.
The key question is: if there *is* something which can take an RFC formatted digest message, and convert it to multipart/mixed with an HTML body as Andrew's users desire... is there anyway to get Mailman to *call* that, in the digestifying process?
Cheers, -- jra
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274
On 12/16/2014 08:56 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Correct.
It is not possible to do this at all for the plain text format digest since by definition, that contains no HTML.
For the MIME format digest, I think Stephen is correct. The MIME digest currently has the following structure
multipart/mixed text/plain (the boilerplate) text/plain (the digest_header if any) text/plain (the TOC) multipart/digest message/rfc822 (the first message) message/rfc822 (the next message) text/plain (the digest_footer if any)
One would have to create the TOC as text/html rather than text/plain and add links to the various message parts. These can't be anchor tags. Do do that would require HTMLifying the entire digest. They could probably be RFC2393 mid: references though. That might not be too difficult to do, although various popular web mail clients, e.g. gmail, currently don't make it possible to open an individual digest message as a separate message, so how they would deal with such a digest is unknown.
I might experiment with this at some point, but I am not optimistic that a format can be created that would work with all the freemail clients.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro wrote:
Andrew Hodgson writes:
No, it cannot be done without coding.
Correct.
I pretty much thought as much, but wanted to check anyway.
That was exactly what I was looking for, just didn't say it as well.
It is not possible to do this at all for the plain text format digest since by definition, that contains no HTML.
I wouldn't look to do it for the plain text version, some users may not want this at all so would stick to the plain text version. You could possibly look into creating a different digest type such as HTML indexed or similar, but I would see it as a completely different digest type.
For the MIME format digest, I think Stephen is correct. The MIME digest currently has the following structure
One would have to create the TOC as text/html rather than text/plain and add links to the various message parts. These can't be anchor tags. Do do that would require HTMLifying the entire digest. They could probably be >RFC2393 mid: references though. That might not be too difficult to do, although various popular web mail clients, e.g. gmail, currently don't make it possible to open an individual digest message as a separate message, so how >they would deal with such a digest is unknown.
I don't believe you would need each message as separate MIME parts. For reference I am going to copy out a template an admin of another list sent me - they are using Sympa. This is a template they use for doing exactly the same thing. I don't know anything about Sympa, but I think the template will give you a slightly better idea of what I am looking for.
Thanks. Andrew.
---cut here---
We worked on a new version of the digest plain.
You should try this template on a test list.
From: [% fromlist %] To: [% to %] Reply-to: [% replyto %] Subject: [% FILTER qencode %][%|loc(list.name,date)%]%1 Digest %2[%END%] [% IF total_group > 1 -%]([% current_group %]/[% total_group %])[% END %][%END%] Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="[% boundary1 %]"
--[% boundary1 %] Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"; Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
[%|loc(list.name,date)%]%1 Digest %2[%END%]
<br>
[%|loc%]Table of contents:[%END%]
<ul> [% FOREACH m = msg_list -%] <li><a name="N0"><a href="#N[% m.id %]">[% m.id %] - [% m.subject %]</a> - [% m.from %] </li> [% END %] </ul> <hr color="#0000ff">
[% FOREACH m = msg_list -%] <p></b><a name="N[% m.id %]">[% m.id %] -</a> Date: [% m.date %] Author: [% m.from %] <br> Subject: <b><font color="#0000ff"> [% m.subject %] </b></font><br>
[% m.plain_body %]
<br> <table align="center"> <tr> <td><a href="mailto: [% m.from %]?Subject= [% m.subject %] "> Answer to author</a></td> <td> <--> </td> <td><a href="mailto: [% replyto %]?Subject= [% m.subject %] "> Answer to list</a></td> <td> <--> </td> <td><a href="#N0">Back to table of content</a></td> </tr> </table> <hr color="#0000ff"></font>
[% END %]
<br> [%|loc(list.name,date)%]End of %1 Digest %2[%END%] <br>
</body></html>
--[% boundary1 %]--
On 12/16/2014 11:14 AM, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
I don't believe you would need each message as separate MIME parts. For reference I am going to copy out a template an admin of another list sent me - they are using Sympa. This is a template they use for doing exactly the same thing. I don't know anything about Sympa, but I think the template will give you a slightly better idea of what I am looking for.
So what you are really looking for is a third digest format which is essentially the current plain text digest, but HTMLified to the extent that the TOC contains tags like <a href="#msg1">Subject 1</a> ... and each message is preceded with a tag like <a name="msg1"> ... and the rest of the digest outside of those is perhaps surrounded by <pre> ... </pre> and a HEAD section with something like
<style type="text/css"> pre { white-space: pre-wrap; } </style>
to let long lines wrap to the window width.
This is probably doable without too much effort, but I have no plan to do it. The side effects of adding a third digest format are messy.
If someone wanted to replace the current plain text digest for their own list or site, say by making a site or list specific version of the ToDigest handler, I don't think it would be two difficult, but there are standards (RFC 1153 for plain digests, RFC 2046 for MIME digests) that govern the format of these digest types. Thus, I wouldn't hijack one of the two existing digest types for this new type.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Andrew Hodgson writes:
I thought you said your users hate MIME digests?
[% m.plain_body %]
I suspect this means "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce": images and attachments give us indigestion. Maybe no HTML, either.
Note that this template actually contains code which is interpreted by the digesting engine, and as-is it probably is broken for foreign languages.
On 12/16/2014 10:25 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
There's a typo above. The correct RFC is RFC2392.
That notwithstanding, I tried taking a normal MIME digest and changing the Content-Type of the TOC part from text/plain to text/html and changing the actual raw TOC from:
Today's Topics:
- Subject 1 (Author)
- Subject 2 (Author)
- Subject 3 (Author)
- Subject 4 (Author) ...
to:
Today's Topics: <ol> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 1 (Author)</a> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 2 (Author)</a> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 3 (Author)</a> <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 4 (Author)</a> ... </ol>
where "mid:..." referenced the actual Message-IDs of the messages. I then opened that message with Thunderbird and it presented a nice looking TOC with links, but when I clicked one, it asked me for an application to handle the mid: URL scheme.
I then tried adding Content-ID: headers to the messages and referencing those with cid:... URLs. This time Thunderbird at least understood what cid: was, but hovering over the link showed the target as 'about:blank' and clicking it went nowhere.
I didn't bother trying any other MUAs, but I conclude that this approach, while easy to implement and still producing an RFC 2046 compliant message, is only going to be of benefit with limited if any MUAs.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Would it work better for them if you adjusted digest_size_threshhold so they receive digests with fewer messages? I've never used this setting, so I'm assuming it will send more than one a day if enough messages arrive.
Unfortunately the setting is for the size of the digest in KB, not the number of messages in it, but it might work if the size of the messages doesn't vary much.
If you keep archives, another alternative might be to create a script to send daily archive links to them. They'd have to work out which messages were new, but it might work for them.
Peter Shute
On Tue, 16 Dec 2014, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
I am subscribed in MIME digest mode to all lists which support them. I find they are a great way to receive messages once per day (more or less) without being pestered by single messages as they come.
Good mail user agents (MUAs) should have a way to deal with MIME digests internally. I am not familiar (nor comfortable) with "modern" MUAs (GUI-driven), since I use good old alpine.
The default way of alpine to deal with digests is slightly awkward. One presses V to View the digest index (which is not in a nice shape to read, I admit), then moves the current line on one of the RFC/822 items, and clicks, and accesses the individual message as a normal mail.
My way uses a custom key (D) to which I assigned the execution of a one-liner script which contains
formail +1 -ds >! ~/mail/temporary
this splits the digest into a mail folder. The same key then goes to the index of the folder, so one can access each message as if it were a normal mail.
I presume all good MUAs should have a way to deal with MIME digests, it is just a matter for the user to find it. If you can find it for the most common MUAs used by your users, then you could write instructions in a FAQ
--
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy) For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
Do not like Firefox >=29 ? Get Pale Moon ! http://www.palemoon.org
On Wed, 17 Dec 2014, Peter Shute wrote:
So you have found a way to bypass the digest and pestering me ! :-)
this splits the digest into a mail folder.
technically speaking, "on arrival" pertains to a mail delivery agent, and not to a MUA, which may operate when first entered by the user.
Perhaps it is possible to use Alpine "filter rules", but I never tried them and am not familiar with them.
On the other hand formail is part of procmail, which IS a delivery agent (actually on my SuSE it is the default delivery agent of sendmail). Any "filtering on arrival" can be more or less easily done with procmail. I do an extensive use of it http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/Procmail/
So you could do what you propose straight with procmail !
It is mainly a matter of user preferences (YMMV ?)
I do divert some specific messages to specific folders, seminar announcements for one, and different level of spam for another.
Concerning mailing lists, I consider them of a more transient nature, I am not interested in keeping their messages "forever". So the MIME digest mechanism is fine insofar I want to receive all messages of the day at one moment. Then I usually look at the list of messages (almost all digests I know, notably the ones generated by mailman, have a list of subjects close to the top) ... if I see no subjects which interest me I just delete the entire digest. If I see something interesting, I press D, expand in a temporary folder, read the messages and reply to or archive the few really interesting ones.
I actually do use procmail on mailing lists to divert their messages (which usually are entire digests) to a specific folder when on vacation. We can have pretty long vacations in this country :-)
I have divided the lists I am subscribed to in two categories and so have just two folders, one per category.
For the less interesting lists, when I am away I divert them to /dev/null.
For the most interesting lsits, I divert them to a cumulative folder, so I can read them when I am back.
This way my INBOX is not cluttered with mailing list messages, but only with messages from invididuals. This makes easy to sort the backlog when I return. Or to access the INBOX via a webmailer (which I may do once or twice per vacation period ... I am not the type which needs to be permanently connected :-))
--
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy) For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
Do not like Firefox >=29 ? Get Pale Moon ! http://www.palemoon.org
Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
Yes. I've done it at the MDA with gmail, Exchange and I think Yahoo. I used to do it in the MUA when I used Outlook Express. That works ok if you're only reading email with one device.
You are a very sophisticated digests user. Perhaps there are sophisticated digest users on our list, but we also have plenty of unsophisticated ones, who demand that other list members don't clutter their digests with things they aren't interested in.
They create problems when they reply by constructing the reply by hand with a different subject line, or by simply replying to the digest email, with unchanged subject line and quoting the digest in full. The only reason they use digest mode in the first place is because they don't know how to create message rules to keep their Inbox clear of list mail.
You can probably tell I don't like digest mode at all. I'd rather encourage people to learn how to use message rules.
I have divided the lists I am subscribed to in two categories and so have just two folders, one per category.
Personally I move all list mail to a folder per list. I've never thought of mixing mail from different lists, but that is an idea worth thinking about. It would simplify things greatly.
Peter Shute
Peter Shute writes:
Yes, it's a shame that to be a popular MUA you have to suck. None of the above are necessary concommittents of digest mode. They happen because things that the MUA could deal with with only a tiny bit of thought on the part of the programmer are ignored in favor of tweaking the gradients used on the buttons.
Digest messages would actually be a better workflow for your users if the MUAs bothered to implement:
1. Display digest messages in the summary as single messages.
2. If the user clicks on the digest message, it is opened as a
folder, not as a message.This is *such* a no-brainer, and it shouldn't be hard to do (as implementing MUA features goes) since most MUAs already have to deal with both mbox imports (very similar to "plain" digests) and MIME structure.
Message rules OTOH are a serious cognitive burden, even on experienced users. At least for me, several of my "communities" overlap, and my employer has turned into my most unruly source of "spam" (not to mention the fact that a lot of *real* spam gets accepted by its mailing lists!) GMail's "filter mail like this" feature does a *very* poor job of creating usable filters for them. Especially, it doesn't seem to know about how to determine that mail is forwarded through a list (and so "mail like this" should use "List-ID" and "List-Post", not "From" or "Subject")
If that's a common experience, it means that users need to learn how "author" is defined (which, especially with DMARC From-munging and Outlook's "on behalf of" mistreatment of Mailman mail, is often hardly intuitive to the average user), how to properly specify list tags in Subject, and so on.
I don't disagree with you that with current popular MUAs, you'd be better off with your users learning how to use rules, but really, digest mode *should* be a feature. :-(
As I said before, Alpine can do that or be instructed to do that. I hope it is allowed to post a few screendumps to demonstrate
The mailindex.png shows part of my MUA index screen. The last message numbered 34 is a digest from this mailing list.
- If I click on it, it will open the entire digest as a single message
- If I then give command V it will show the screen in maildigest.png, i.e. "attachment index"
This is default action. The "attachment index" is not very perspicuous but if you click on any of the entries numberd 3,n and labelled "Message/RFC822" you will open the corresponding e-mail message.
This satisfies your item 1 in three clicks
Instead if you start from the MUA index screen, select message 34 with the cursor and type shift-D, you are prompted for a folder collection/ folder name (it proposes the folder name "temporary" so if you agree and do not have to change the folder collection where it is located, just just press return, and you get a folder index screen like the third attachment maildigestindex.png
This satisfies your item 2 in a min of 2 clicks. However it is not standard behaviour, it is my personal customization. I had to play with programmable keys and write a one-liner external script to support it.
But ... yes, you can :-)
--
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy) For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
Do not like Firefox >=29 ? Get Pale Moon ! http://www.palemoon.org
Lucio Chiappetti writes:
I hope it is allowed to post a few screendumps to demonstrate
Unfortunately, Mailman @python.org doesn't pass those, and they don't get into mail-archive.com because it's subscribed by mail, not direct from the Mailman daemon.
This satisfies your item 1 in three clicks This satisfies your item 2 in a min of 2 clicks.
Actually, most Emacs-based MUAs are able to treat digests as folders by default. No customizations required.
The ones I've used are also able to "explode" digests into single messages. But for most purposes treating them as folders is more convenient.
On Fri, 19 Dec 2014, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
OK, should be here (do not know why first got a different name)
http://i62.tinypic.com/2l94j5s.png http://tinypic.com/r/syv5mu/8 http://tinypic.com/r/33ykoyc/8
Actually, most Emacs-based MUAs are able to treat digests as folders by default. No customizations required.
Then you are beyond my mark, and possibly both about average user.
Lucio Chiappetti writes:
Not really. My primary MUA is VM, which presents a rather simple menubar & toolbar interface to the average user. However, a lot of intelligent/sophisticated/too-smart-for-their-own-good/too-much-free- time-on-their-hands hackers have tweaked things so that most actions do something sensible most of the time. (Of course, if you want to it's easy enough to access the more advanced features via keyboard.)
The big problem with Emacs-based MUAs is that it's way too easy to escape into Emacs itself and never find your way back to the safety of the WIMP-y MUA. :-)
and possibly both about average user.
Yeah, that's why I didn't suggest asking them to get real MUAs.
On 12/16/2014 6:40 AM, Andrew Hodgson <andrew@hodgsonfamily.org> wrote:
See this thread from back in 2010 when I asked for the very same thing, but in much more detail:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2010-February/020958.ht...
participants (7)
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Andrew Hodgson -
Jay Ashworth -
Lucio Chiappetti -
Mark Sapiro -
Peter Shute -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
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