[Mailman-Users] can one attach figures to messages ??

[Nigel Metheringham]

marcello.pavan at triumf.ca said:
> One thing that absolutely we require is the ability to send figure
> attachments (usually Postscript).  

Mailman allows attachments (of any type) through to the list.  There is 
a parameter specifying a size limit, which you may wish to change 
(Administrator web pages, General Options, "Maximum length in Kb of a 
message body. Use 0 for no limit."

However the archiver may give you problems....

> Another thing is that we would
> really like to be able to find old messages with a keyword search. 

The basic mailman archiver has no search facilities.  There are patches 
to integrate htdig into it - see the patch archive on sourceforge.

However the archiver has one major drawback for the application you 
describe - it is not MIME aware and attachments sent to the list will 
appear inline as an ascii mess.  If you want to use Mailman as the 
mailing list manager, then I would strongly suggest using a different 
archiver, such as MHonArc.
  http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/mhonarc.html

There have been discussions about using MHonArc in the past, and a 
number of people are using it as their main archiver, so I would 
strongly suggest its use if pipermail (the internal archiver) is not 
suitable for you, however I do not use it myself.  You also need an 
additional indexer.

Would any of the list people using MHonArc like to produce a doc 
fragment on integration with Mailman and indexing etc.

An alternative would be to run Mailman with a MIME content stripper and 
not archive the postscript.  I am also working on a Mailman prefilter 
which strips MIME and makes the attachments available as URLs on the 
mailing list machine - I have a working version of this in perl but its 
dog slow.... the rewrite in in progress.

	Nigel.

-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]