[Mailman-Users] Message HTML/Plain text. Wish client display HTML when possible

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Apr 29 19:44:39 CEST 2006


>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Carpentier <thomasc at belgaboard.com> writes:

    Thomas> Is there something to do, on the mailman side, such that
    Thomas> the message is automatically displayed in HTML only (at
    Thomas> least at first alternative) when the mail program permits
    Thomas> it and the options are enabled and in Plain Text in the
    Thomas> other cases?

No.  This is a client-side problem.

Mailman does not currently support this.  In theory you could have a
per-user option to strip HTML in Mailman, but this seems rather
impractical.  There are too many weird things that can happen in
multipart mails.  Also, some people may wish to choose at the time
they read the mail, rather than in their subscription settings.

The only reliable way to handle this is to send both text and HTML as
a multipart/alternative.  That assumes that your members have mail
programs that handle MIME properly, but most common clients do
nowadays.

    Thomas> Any suggestion will be welcome.

Make sure that Thunderbird follows the recommendation in RFC 2046, i.e.,
the text/plain version followed by the text/html version.  (I believe
it does, but it may be configurable.)

There are FAQs on mail clients that explain how to configure them to
handle MIME correctly; you might want to post URLs to them for your
members.


-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.



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