[Mailman-Developers] Achieving better formatting of archives

Chris Boulter chris at jellybaby.net
Mon Jan 19 12:02:44 EST 2004


Hi,

Has anyone encountered (or solved) these problems with Mailman's (2.1.2)
list archives? I'm aware that an improved archiver is planned for MM3, so
I'm just looking for workarounds. Suggestions gratefully received...

1. Attachments lose their filename extension. On my installation, files
attached to emails which are not of a 'known' file extension (.txt, .html,
etc) are given an extension of '.bat'. This confuses users looking at the
attachment with Internet Explorer. They click the link, but their browser
ignores the Content-Type header of text/plain and reports the file as an
MS DOS batch file. The file renaming in the archiver seems to be intended as a
security measure, but our lists have restricted membership and don't need
this safeguard. I think I might have identified the relevant bit of code to
change to avoid this.

2. HTML emails are not dealt with nicely in the archive. By editing
ARCHIVE_HTML_SANITIZER, I can get either a plain-text inline version (by
specifying a command invoking lynx) but the HTML is lost, or some variation
on removing or HTML-escaping the HTML part. What I'd really like is an
inline plain-text version with a link to the original HTML part (unescaped,
so it'll render in the user's browser with tables/graphics/etc intact -
again, ok for us due to 'trusted' subscribers)

3. Long lines in emails. No word wrapping is done on plain text emails;
sensible enough in a way. However, we think most of our users will send
emails with long lines. When displayed in a browser, these seem to give very
long lines with a horizontal scroll bar (since the long lines are enclosed
in <PRE> tags). Ideally our page would be wrapped by the browser, yet still
preserve paragraph boundaries and indenting. I've failed to find an HTML way
to do this. My current plan is to modify the archiving mechanism to word
wrap to a fixed 80 chars, perhaps using the Unix command-line utility
'fold'.

Many thanks,
Chris




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