Everything is an attachment
I have set up a list that is used for announcements only. There is a list of members, but only a few can post. No digests, just immediate delivery. We have a mixed bag of recipient MUAs here, and although OE receives the mail normally, Outlook users receive email with the header only in the body of the email, and the real body and footer as attachments.
I have searched the archives/FAQ for a solution and may have found an answer, but am not sure. The FAQ 4.39 seems to indicate no real solution other than changing MUA, but in
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg36757.html
the solution was a blank line in the footer. I have a header with a carriage return that forms the blank line. Although this is easy to test to see if this is really the problem, is there an easy way to create the separator line to allow a blank line between the header and body other than asking each poster to remember to put a blank line at the top of the body? I'm still not sure why the footer is also an attachment.
I checked the sender's Outlook prefs and checked the "Send as plain text" in his Contacts for this particular address, but that did not help. Can anyone think of another place I may need to change something?
In the mean time, I will change the header and retest.
Thanks
Steve Campbell campbell@cnpapers.com Charleston Newspapers
Steve Campbell wrote:
I have set up a list that is used for announcements only. There is a list of members, but only a few can post. No digests, just immediate delivery. We have a mixed bag of recipient MUAs here, and although OE receives the mail normally, Outlook users receive email with the header only in the body of the email, and the real body and footer as attachments.
This indicates the list header and footer are being added as separate mime parts.
I have searched the archives/FAQ for a solution and may have found an answer, but am not sure. The FAQ 4.39 seems to indicate no real solution other than changing MUA,
Or sending a single part, plain text only post in the character set of the list language (us-ascii for English).
but in
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg36757.html
the solution was a blank line in the footer.
I think you're misinterpreting that post. I think she is saying her problem was caused by a footer which consisted of only a blank line and when she removed the footer completely, the problem went away.
I have a header with a carriage return that forms the blank line. Although this is easy to test to see if this is really the problem, is there an easy way to create the separator line to allow a blank line between the header and body other than asking each poster to remember to put a blank line at the top of the body? I'm still not sure why the footer is also an attachment.
The blank line is not the issue. If both a header and a footer are added, either both will be added inline if possible, or both will be added as separate MIME parts.
I checked the sender's Outlook prefs and checked the "Send as plain text" in his Contacts for this particular address, but that did not help. Can anyone think of another place I may need to change something?
That should be part of the solution. The other part (at least in Mailman 2.1.6 and above), is an attempt is made to convert everything to unicode and then back to the character set of the list (us-ascii for English). If this fails, an attempt is made to convert back to the character set of the original post, and if that fails, the header and footer are added as separate parts.
So the bottom line is the original post must be a single part, plain text message, and in a declared character set that contains all the characters used in the message, header and footer.
If you have set the poster's Outlook to send 'plain text only' to the list, I suspect the problem may be "smart quotes" or other characters in the message.
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Sapiro" msapiro@value.net To: "Steve Campbell" campbell@cnpapers.com; mailman-users@python.org Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 11:38 AM Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Everything is an attachment
Steve Campbell wrote:
I have set up a list that is used for announcements only. There is a list of members, but only a few can post. No digests, just immediate delivery. We have a mixed bag of recipient MUAs here, and although OE receives the mail normally, Outlook users receive email with the header only in the body of the email, and the real body and footer as attachments.
This indicates the list header and footer are being added as separate mime parts.
I have searched the archives/FAQ for a solution and may have found an answer, but am not sure. The FAQ 4.39 seems to indicate no real solution other than changing MUA,
Or sending a single part, plain text only post in the character set of the list language (us-ascii for English).
but in
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg36757.html
the solution was a blank line in the footer.
I think you're misinterpreting that post. I think she is saying her problem was caused by a footer which consisted of only a blank line and when she removed the footer completely, the problem went away.
That's not hard for me to believe (that I'm misinterpretting, I mean).
I have a header with a carriage return that forms the blank line. Although this is easy to test to see if this is really the problem, is there an easy way to create the separator line to allow a blank line between the header and body other than asking each poster to remember to put a blank line at the top of the body? I'm still not sure why the footer is also an attachment.
The blank line is not the issue. If both a header and a footer are added, either both will be added inline if possible, or both will be added as separate MIME parts.
I checked the sender's Outlook prefs and checked the "Send as plain text" in his Contacts for this particular address, but that did not help. Can anyone think of another place I may need to change something?
That should be part of the solution. The other part (at least in Mailman 2.1.6 and above), is an attempt is made to convert everything to unicode and then back to the character set of the list (us-ascii for English). If this fails, an attempt is made to convert back to the character set of the original post, and if that fails, the header and footer are added as separate parts.
Does anyone have RPMs for something 2.1.6 or greater for an RHEL 3/Tao 1.0 system. I am running 2.1.5 as this seems to be the latest available from the normal yum repositories. Maybe this would help. Are there any gotchas for the upgrade if I find them?
So the bottom line is the original post must be a single part, plain text message, and in a declared character set that contains all the characters used in the message, header and footer.
If you have set the poster's Outlook to send 'plain text only' to the list, I suspect the problem may be "smart quotes" or other characters in the message.
I'm still not finished testing, but I did get the sender to receive the header, body, and footer all in one message. He forgot to add the attachment. So the test was a little inconclusive.
Thanks for the help
Steve
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Steve Campbell wrote:
I'm still not finished testing, but I did get the sender to receive the header, body, and footer all in one message. He forgot to add the attachment. So the test was a little inconclusive.
Are you saying that the original posts to the list contain attachments that go to the list? If so, the list header and footer will always be added as separate MIME parts (attachments).
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Sapiro" msapiro@value.net To: "Steve Campbell" campbell@cnpapers.com; mailman-users@python.org Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 12:40 PM Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Everything is an attachment
Steve Campbell wrote:
I'm still not finished testing, but I did get the sender to receive the header, body, and footer all in one message. He forgot to add the attachment. So the test was a little inconclusive.
Are you saying that the original posts to the list contain attachments that go to the list? If so, the list header and footer will always be added as separate MIME parts (attachments).
Exactly, yes that is correct.
So there is no way, other than changing MUA (Outlook) for this to work, even with the newer version?
BTW, I did find an RPM, but don't know it validity from:
http://www.wesmo.com/rpm2html/x86/mailman-2.1.6-1.i386.html
Is it worth the effort to upgrade from 2.1.5 to 2.1.6? I'd also really like to stay in the RPM arena on most everything. It appears to put everything in it's proper place.
Thanks again.
Steve
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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Steve Campbell wrote:
BTW, I did find an RPM, but don't know it validity from:
http://www.wesmo.com/rpm2html/x86/mailman-2.1.6-1.i386.html
Is it worth the effort to upgrade from 2.1.5 to 2.1.6? I'd also really like to stay in the RPM arena on most everything. It appears to put everything in it's proper place.
I prefer to keep my rpm-based systems using rpm packages as well, but it's very important to make sure that the packages are made well. When in doubt, download the source rpm and verify that it doesn't do anything malicious or just plain wrong (this goes for vendor packages sometimes, as was the case with the Red Hat packages for RH9).
Looking at the changelog on that package it appears that Scott A. Hughes updated and made some modifications to the stock RHEL package. If I were you, I'd do the same thing and update to 2.1.8, testing carefully on a spare system before installing it on your production box(es).
Building rpm packages isn't hard, but it does require some reading and practice. I'd recommend it if you manage multiple rpm-based systems, but YMMV. If that all seems like too much work, building mailman from source is very straightforward. You'll just have to adjust to the differences in installation paths if you're used to the patched rpm packages that use FHS locations for files.
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. -- Dr. Milton Friedman, Nobel-Prize-winning economist.
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Steve Campbell wrote:
Mark Sapiro wrote:
Are you saying that the original posts to the list contain attachments that go to the list? If so, the list header and footer will always be added as separate MIME parts (attachments).
Exactly, yes that is correct.
So there is no way, other than changing MUA (Outlook) for this to work, even with the newer version?
Well ..., it makes sense to me that if a post is multipart mixed, and the first sub part is text/plain, then this is a plain text post with attachments, and we could add the list header/footer to the text/plain part just as we do for single part, text/plain messages. I don't think this would be hard to do, but here are the issues if I do this.
It would be done on the "trunk" for Mailman 2.2. You would have to get that version of Mailman/Handlers/Decorate.py (just the one module) from the sourceforge.net site and put it in your installation.
I'm not sure that this is "generally desireable". I think it is, but I would first ask this list and maybe Mailman-developers@python.org if anyone would have a problem with it.
BTW, I did find an RPM, but don't know it validity from:
http://www.wesmo.com/rpm2html/x86/mailman-2.1.6-1.i386.html
Is it worth the effort to upgrade from 2.1.5 to 2.1.6?
Todd has already given a better answer than I could to the RPM question.
As far as it being worth it to upgrade to 2.1.6, there are a few security issues in 2.1.5 that are fixed in 2.1.6, so yes, I think it's worth it, but I would suggest trying to go all the way to 2.1.8 if possible. But none of this will change the header/footer issue for mail with attachments that go to the list.
-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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Mark Sapiro wrote:
As far as it being worth it to upgrade to 2.1.6, there are a few security issues in 2.1.5 that are fixed in 2.1.6, so yes, I think it's worth it, but I would suggest trying to go all the way to 2.1.8 if possible. But none of this will change the header/footer issue for mail with attachments that go to the list.
FWIW, the Red Hat packages should have all of the security holes backported, so users of those packages should need to upgrade just to be secure. I don't run any RHEL systems though, so I can't say that I've looked over the packages carefully (and even if I had, not many people have a reason to take my word for the security issues being fixed :).
I'd still agree that anyone running mailman in production should look into updating their installations to get the improvements that have come along since 2.1.5.
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
Truth is like a well-known whore. Everybody knows her but it's embarrassing to meet her in the street. -- Wolfgang Borchert
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participants (3)
-
Mark Sapiro -
Steve Campbell -
Todd Zullinger