could the following be directly related to the toggle between MIME digests and plain-text ones?
(herewith the question)
I've been using mailman for a very long time, since I migrated from SmartList maybe 12 years ago.
I have a multi-question topic that takes a few questions and combines them into a cohesive whole.
This is what I'd like to ask:
- My main mailinglist runs to about 2000 subscribers. I would say perhaps it's evenly split between those who would like to have something more blog-ish (web-based) and those who would like to have it remain email-based. However, I've just noticed something on a user's cellphone-based email and their web-based email; this is one of the people who would like me to move the whole interface to Facebook. (and I have spent years developing the wiki associated with this mailinglist!). (see http://www.colorist.org/wiki ) Now I think FB has its place, but this is a professional forum where almost instantaneous answers that come from mailman's email-based design are very valuable to that half of the community who use it for asking important questions that are answered in literally, a moment or two. Yet I just looked at this particular user's celphone (Android) message queue, (he subscribes to the digest) and saw that the digests he's getting are empty attachments indicating 2k in length (I forced one out that is about 8 pages to test). Then he also complained that on Earthlink's "Webmail" he gets his digests not with concatenated text like I'm used to seeing, but with no text in the message and instead, an "Attachments" header that lists each message (horizontally) as "Forwarded message" "Forwarded message" etc. (which when clicked, show the messages, supposedly). He hates this of course.
For what it's worth, he says Outlook exhibits the same behavior as Earthlink's Webmail.
So I'm wondering, has something changed in the way the RFCs are not being honored; are digests not 'homogenous' across platforms any more; is there a way to fix this behavior which may be affecting others?
Thank you to Barry, et al., for maintaining Mailman. btw I'm running 2.1.12 on CentOS.
Rob Lingelbach rob@colorist.org
Rob Lingelbach wrote:
could the following be directly related to the toggle between MIME digests and plain-text ones?
It almost certainly is.
- Yet I just looked at this particular user's celphone (Android) message queue, (he subscribes to the digest) and saw that the digests he's getting are empty attachments indicating 2k in length (I forced one out that is about 8 pages to test).
I use K-9 mail on an Android phone, and it's handling of MIME format digests is a disaster. See <http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/issues/detail?id=2017>. I think there may be similar issues with the Android native mail client. I don't know about iPhones.
Then he also complained that on Earthlink's "Webmail" he gets his digests not with concatenated text like I'm used to seeing, but with no text in the message and instead, an "Attachments" header that lists each message (horizontally) as "Forwarded message" "Forwarded message" etc. (which when clicked, show the messages, supposedly). He hates this of course.
For what it's worth, he says Outlook exhibits the same behavior as Earthlink's Webmail.
So both Earthlink web mail and Outlook do not render a MIME digest very well.
So I'm wondering, has something changed in the way the RFCs are not being honored; are digests not 'homogenous' across platforms any more; is there a way to fix this behavior which may be affecting others?
Have your user switch to plain digests.
For a long time, Mailman digest subscribers have had a choice between MIME format and 'plain' format digests. The MIME format digest is fully conformant with the MIME RFCs, but not all MUAs deal with it well. The plain format digest is (mostly) RFC 1153 compliant, but compliance only matters to digest exploder software. Virtually all MUAs should be able to properly render it, but non-plain text message parts get replaced by short blurbs containing a URL to where they can be found, and one can't directly reply to an individual message, at least without an 'exploder'.
Thus, each user gets to choose which format better suits their needs.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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Rob Lingelbach