Attach footer only once?
Is it possible for footers to only be attached once? I am hosting a legal mailing list and their footer is quite long. We recently updated to Mailman 3 and the list has become more active as a result but in that activity the users have noticed that the footer just continually stacks up at the bottom of subsequent emails. Is there any way to avoid this scenario? My google-fu has failed me and the only conversation relevant to this topic I've found here was related specifically to digests.
Is it possible for footers to only be attached once? I am hosting a legal mailing list and their footer is quite long. We recently updated to Mailman 3 and the list has become more active as a result but in that activity the users have noticed that the footer just continually stacks up at the bottom of subsequent emails. Generally that's because once you reply, what appears as a footer becomes
On 2/8/2024 3:24 PM, Tim Houseman wrote: part of the message body. There may be a "plug-in" that will find and cut them out.
Is there any way to avoid this scenario?
Teach the users to edit their postings? (Top-posting is a major contributing factor in this, and while it's common in business IMHO it's still bad form for many other reasons.)
Do you -need- such a long footer? Can you simply include a link to the disclaimer elsewhere?
BTW, there's a different mailing list for mailman3, might want to ask about it there.
Later,
z!
On 2/9/2024 10:57 AM, Carl Zwanzig wrote:
On 2/8/2024 3:24 PM, Tim Houseman wrote:
Is it possible for footers to only be attached once? I am hosting a legal mailing list and their footer is quite long. We recently updated to Mailman 3 and the list has become more active as a result but in that activity the users have noticed that the footer just continually stacks up at the bottom of subsequent emails. Generally that's because once you reply, what appears as a footer becomes part of the message body. There may be a "plug-in" that will find and cut them out.
Is there any way to avoid this scenario?
Teach the users to edit their postings? (Top-posting is a major contributing factor in this, and while it's common in business IMHO it's still bad form for many other reasons.)
Do you -need- such a long footer? Can you simply include a link to the disclaimer elsewhere?
BTW, there's a different mailing list for mailman3, might want to ask about it there.
Later,
z!
The poster said that this the Mailman list is a legal list, and legal firms have a habit of putting lots of "legalese" in the footer of mail messages. [Note that I nave removed the footer from Carl's reply.]
--Barry Finkel
On 2/8/24 15:24, Tim Houseman wrote:
Is it possible for footers to only be attached once? I am hosting a legal mailing list and their footer is quite long. We recently updated to Mailman 3 and the list has become more active as a result but in that activity the users have noticed that the footer just continually stacks up at the bottom of subsequent emails. Is there any way to avoid this scenario?
The short answer is No.
The long answer is you have to train the list members to not top post and to only quote material which is necessary to establish context for the reply. This is particularly difficult as many freemail providers have UIs which encourage top posting and may even obscure the fact that they are including a quote of the entire message being replied to.
I have tried in the past to programmatically detect excessive quoting and hold such posts. This resulted in so much negative feedback that I gave up.
You could try putting a -- line at the beginning of the footer to
make it look like a signature. At least some MUAs do not include
signatures in quoted material in replies.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 2/9/24 12:21, Mark Sapiro wrote: ...
You could try putting a
--line at the beginning of the footer to make it look like a signature. At least some MUAs do not include signatures in quoted material in replies.
However if you have a signature and a footer, both delimited with "-- \n", what gets stripped off, if anything, is anybody's guess. :(
Dima
If there is a website associated with the mailing list, you could move the information that is currently contained in the footer to a dedicted page on that website and shorten the footer to a one-line reference, such as "Mailing list terms and conditions: see [insert link to website]". It would not eliminate the multiple footers but at least keep that tail short.
Also, if users create ever long messages by keeping whole threads attached to their replies, it suggests that there is insufficient understanding of the functionality of modern email softwware, which can show related messages grouped into threads. This is, of course, an organisational/educationl issue, not a technical one. (I would suggest that in the face of apparent problems - in general, not just with mailing lists - it is often more effective to develop organisational solutions rather than relying on technical fixes).
Ian
"Tim Houseman" <tim@worxco.com> wrote:
users have noticed that the footer just continually stacks up at the bottom of subsequent emails. Is there any way to avoid this scenario?
--
On 2/9/2024 3:31 PM, H Ian Zhang via Mailman-Users wrote:
This is, of course, an organisational/educationl issue, not a technical one.
And unfortunately, solving "people problems" with technology seldom ends well.
(arguments for top posting and not trimming quotes- "But it's got the entire conversation in the message! You never need the older messages" "You say that like it's a good thing, and I already -have- the older messages. In my inbox.")
z!
On 2/10/24 09:56, Carl Zwanzig wrote:
(arguments for top posting and not trimming quotes- "But it's got the entire conversation in the message! You never need the older messages" "You say that like it's a good thing, and I already -have- the older messages. In my inbox.")
And more importantly, threads are not linear. A posts. B replies all to A. C replies all to A. C's post does not include B's reply.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On Mon, Feb 12, 2024 at 12:02 PM Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
Carl Zwanzig writes:
And unfortunately, solving "people problems" with technology seldom ends well.
I find that using appropriate technology often helps me be a less problematic people. :-)
:-)
-- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223 In an Internet failure case, the #1 suspect is a constant: DNS. "Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-) [How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]
Tim Houseman writes:
Is it possible for footers to only be attached once?
They are only attached once. ;-) The part that's annoying your subscribers is included by your posters. A mailing list should not touch the message body provided by the poster, unless there's a specific rule against it (such as executable programs and pornographic images) -- that's too likely to cut important, desired content.
[T]he footer just continually stacks up at the bottom of subsequent emails. Is there any way to avoid this scenario?
Get more courteous subscribers! ;-)
Otherwise, not generically, short of plugging in a well-trained LLM. The problem is that quoting conventions etc differ across mail clients, as do signature blocks. If the signature appears below the quoted footer, it will become quite complex to decide how much to remove, especially since some "modern" (aka nonconformant) clients don't conform to the traditional signature inclusion conventions. On a legal list, removing any disclaimers included in signatures is not likely to make posters happy.
Given how obvious and regular the pattern is to the human eye, it's certainly possible to do a very good job with a particular list and its specific footer, but I think you'll need to hire a consultant for that.
Steve
On Mon, 12 Feb 2024, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
...snip...
Otherwise, not generically, short of plugging in a well-trained LLM. The problem is that quoting conventions etc differ across mail clients, as do signature blocks. If the signature appears below the quoted footer, it will become quite complex to decide how much to remove, especially since some "modern" (aka nonconformant) clients don't conform to the traditional signature inclusion conventions.
That's just silly: We've had "diff" for over THREE full decades now, to say nothing of the variants.
A VERY straight-forward strategy would be to diff the current inbound against the previous one it was in reply to - using threading as already cited. No LLM is needed, well trained or otherwise, and neither is it "quite complex." It's surely far easier than spam detection!
Richard
On 2/12/2024 5:30 AM, Richard wrote:
That's just silly: We've had "diff" for over THREE full decades now, to say nothing of the variants.
And diff is going to fail for this, at least part of the time.
A VERY straight-forward strategy would be to diff the current inbound against the previous one it was in reply to - using threading as already cited. No LLM is needed, well trained or otherwise, and neither is it "quite complex."
I beg to differ. First... which is really the "previous message"? How does it deal with varying amounts of leading whitespace or quote markings. How will it deal with multi-part messages.
One strategy is to count the number of consecutive quote-marked lines and set a threshold for how many is too much, often that's a percentage of total lines and varied by the message size.
If using diff is straightforward, please code up something to drop in the mailman pipeline. Include the test cases used to verify it.
Later,
z!
On 2/12/24 10:32, Carl Zwanzig wrote:
On 2/12/2024 5:30 AM, Richard wrote:
That's just silly: We've had "diff" for over THREE full decades now, to say nothing of the variants.
And diff is going to fail for this, at least part of the time.
The obvious solution is to have an empty footer, then it doesn't matter how many times it gets attached. The problem is then reduced to stripping off people's signatures and, well, why is that an MLM software's job? MLM shouldn't screw with posters' content willy-nilly.
QED Dima
On 2/12/24 5:30 AM, Richard wrote:
A VERY straight-forward strategy would be to diff the current inbound against the previous one it was in reply to - using threading as already cited. No LLM is needed, well trained or otherwise, and neither is it "quite complex." It's surely far easier than spam detection!
The larger problem notwithstanding, the OP's situation is much simpler. He doesn't want to remove irrelevant quotes from incoming mail. He only wants to remove the specific list footer.
This could probably be done in Mailman's incoming runner, but finding and removing the offending text from all incoming message parts including text/html and other text/* parts in addition to text/plain is still non-trivial.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On Mon, 12 Feb 2024, Mark Sapiro wrote:
The larger problem notwithstanding, the OP's situation is much simpler. He doesn't want to remove irrelevant quotes from incoming mail. He only wants to remove the specific list footer.
This could probably be done in Mailman's incoming runner, but finding and removing the offending text from all incoming message parts including text/html and other text/* parts in addition to text/plain is still non-trivial.
I can appreciate how it appears that way and I myself "cut my teeth" on this very issue when writing a mail-related app myself. However, I found a way that made it easy.
What I did was use ripmime to parse the email and have it spit out the email into its constituent parts while also still leaving the original email whole, and then it was pretty straight-forward, though, of course, HTML markup is a whole 'nother issue!
Perhaps that helps someone attack this problem?
Rgds, Richard
On Wed, 14 Feb 2024, Tim Houseman wrote:
Thanks for the response. I thought this was the answer but it is nice to have confirmation. I'd love to tell my client that they need better trained subscribers but the only answer I ever get is "Training our membership is not an option" when there are easy fixes to member complaints. Such is life.
I was kind of hoping that like Richard implied there would be some straightforward milter I could attach and run string matching against. Since that isn't an option though I'll let my client know and we'll move on to things that can be resolved.
Another idea just popped into my head:
IF you could find a basic milter template that has some pass-through capability, you could potentially filter ALL occurrances of the footer and then re-attach ONE when done with it by using the "replace" utility.
Replace is a part of the MySQL package and is available currently on Fedora, and likely other Linux distributions. Here's an example usage:
$ echo "fubar" | replace "b" "f" fufar
(You can also use it on the content of files, but a pipe is likely more applicable to you.)
With a little testing you can probably get something like that working, I'd imagine, first by replacing with nothing, then appending at the end when done? Sure, a bit of work, but logically straight-forward.
Good luck, Richard
participants (9)
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Barry S. Finkel -
Carl Zwanzig -
Dmitri Maziuk -
H Ian Zhang -
Mark Sapiro -
Odhiambo Washington -
Richard -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Tim Houseman