[Mailman-Developers] Thinking about list footers

[Mark Sapiro]

On 05/30/2014 10:35 AM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> 
> What's the expertise on the idea of adding footers in a new MIME text/plain
> part rather than just bolting it onto the text as-is?  (Or is that already
> done?)  What do MUAs generally do with multipart text/plain bodies?


This is what Mailman currently does with msg_header and msg_footer in
all cases *except* the common one where the message after content
filtering is a single-part text/plain message with known character set.

Mailman could easily do this in all cases, but there would be many
complaints due to common MUAs that don't display this well.

MUA's deal with this differently. Some are quite reasonable and just
display all the parts inline in the sequence in which they appear,
although they may also indicate that there are 'attachments'.

Others display only the 'body' and one is required to open or download
and open the attached footer.

Really pathological ones, including IIRC MS Outlook will in cases where
a msg_header part is added, display the msg_header part as the text of
the message with the original body and footer as attachments requiring
additional user action to see.

Also, it is not clear what the legal situation would be in jurisdictions
that require an unsubscribe link in list mail. Is a link in a separate
MIME part that may not be displayed inline by some MUAs satisfaction of
that requirement.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan