[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tanstaafl writes:

 > A really dumb question - is there no way to (reliably, or even at all?)
 > 'interact' with just the headers of messages that are attached?

Yes, there is.  It's called a "MIME digest", and Mailman already
provides that feature as a subscriber option.  This gives the
receiving MUA all the information it needs to do everything you have
asked for (and mutt, Emacs/VM, and Emacs/Gnus all do it; I would
suppose some of the more "user-friendly" MUAs do too).

In HTML, it's indeed possible to attach the messages and provide links
to them as blobs of bytes (spammers do this all the time, for
example), but there is no HTML facility to tell a browser or MUA that
"this here blob is a mail message, do the right thing please", in the
way that it is possible to say "this here blob is an image, do the
right thing please".  It's just a blob of bytes, and you are at the
mercy of the predefined facilities in the viewing software as to what
you can do with it.  Dealing with images as objects embedded in HTML
is nearly universally implemented in HTML viewers (including
full-featured browsers and MUAs).  Dealing with message/rfc822 objects
*embedded in HTML* (as opposed to being received from the mail system)
is not implemented by *anybody* as far as I know.

If you're viewing the message in a full browser like Firefox, you
might actually be able to configure it to call out to a mail program
(eg, Thunderbird or Mutt) to display message/rfc822, and tell it to do
that with HTML code something like

         <object content-id="some-random-looking-string" />.

But then it's not clear how you would be able to set up links on parts
of that object, there's no way to communicate "global" information
provided by the digest (such as the TOC or the List-Post header) to
the MUA in the subprocess, and one has to wonder why you're using
Firefox to read mail if you're just going to call Thunderbird to
display messages.

 > Obviously, for this to work, attachments would have to be displayed
 > in-line, but I already do this, and so does everyone I know, and
 > every MUA I've looked at can view attachments inline, so this
 > shouldn't be an issue...

But that is *exactly* where we started from!  It *is* a problem for
you, or you wouldn't have posted here.  True, it is *not* a problem
for me, or for Mark, or for anybody else I talk to using an MUA
implementing a "folder view" of digests or similar.  We just ask for
a MIME digest and we get all those features (except the List-Post
header, and we're on the way to improving that situation).

But it is a problem for you, and I really don't know why when it works
fine for everybody else I know.  Why your MUA doesn't handle this very
well I do not know.  Have you tried switching your subscription to
MIME digests?  (ISTR discussion of MIME digests but I don't recall you
mentioning whether you tried them.)  If that doesn't help, it's
something you should take up with with the developers of the MUA
product you use.  Or maybe it does handle it, but the feature is
obscure and you need to find out how to use it effectively.

I don't blame you for associating the problem with mailing lists and
Mailman in particular, rather than with your MUA, which I gather you
otherwise find satisfactory.  These days digest use is overwhelmingly
dominated by mailing lists, while ordinary users rarely use them.  But
really, AFAICT the problem (except for propagating the List-Post
header from the digest "container" down to the individual messages,
which is already being dealt with) is that *the software you are using
to read mail* doesn't handle the perfectly usable (with appropriate
mail-reading software), standard-for-20-years-now MIME digests that
Mailman already produces (and has done so for a decade or so).

 > > Of course somebody who can hack code can make it do anything.
 > > But can *you*?  You're the person I'm thinking of when I write
 > > "impossible" referring to the MM admin changing the basic
 > > function.
 > 
 > Why would you do that?

Because you're the kind of person people on this list generally mean
by "admin".  When we refer to a person as an "admin," we are talking
about a role where a person at a certain level of competence (which
need *not* include programming), with certain privileges, uses
documented features to change the list's configuration or do other
operations requiring stylized human intervention (eg, moderation).

People in the admin role don't mess with the code.  The kind of person
who changes code is called a "developer".  Admin-cum-developer types
who work on code when they've got an itch to scratch are common, it's
true, but that is *not* "what admins do", it's "what developers do".

If that's not what *you* mean by admin, I don't know how we're
supposed to know what you mean.  I don't understand why you expect
some random admin "out there" to do anything useful.  Asking here
first is the right thing to do for any feature request.  What mailman-
developers doesn't do for you is relatively unlikely to get done in
general, and especially so in this case, IMO:

 > > OTOH, the people who can hack the code very likely don't need this
 > > feature at all.
 > 
 > Why? Because they all use EMACS?

Or some other MIME-capable MUA, which includes all of the ones you've
mentioned to the best of my knowledge (which isn't that extensive, but
if MIME digests were that hard to use effectively I'd think it would
be a FAQ on this list).  As Mark said, it's hard to get enthusiastic
about implementing this feature because it really is something that
the MUA *should* be able to do.  Email digests are 40 years old at
this point in time, and highly capable, well-thought-out protocols are
available for constructing them (on Mailman's side) and for
interpreting and presenting them (on the MUA side).

 > Sorry, but the condescension in your comments is getting a little
 > old.

I apologize for displaying my irritation.