[Mailman-Users] message archiving problem

[Mark Sapiro]

Rick Pasotto wrote:
>
>On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 07:47:21PM -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>> 
>> What Mailman version is this?
>
>Sorry. I should have specified before. I'm running debian 2.1.9.
>
>> Can you provide a sample message that will illustrate the problem when
>> posted to a list?
>
>attached
>
>If you'll go to http://qctm.org/pipermail/qctm/2007-March/thread.html
>you'll see the three pieces.
<snip>

<portion of message>

>    Master Evaluator: Roger Pierce   
>   Speaker Evaluator:*Peter Bolton   (Scott Teeters)
>   Speaker Evaluator: Steve Murphy   (Rick Pasotto)
>          Grammarian: Peter Bolton   (resplendent)
>               Timer: Roger Pierce   
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  resplendent adj
>       1: having great beauty and splendor; "a glorious spring
>          morning"; "a glorious sunset"; "splendid costumes"; "a
>          kind of splendiferous native simplicity" [syn: {glorious},
>           {splendid}, {splendiferous}]
>       2: richly and brilliantly colorful [syn: {flamboyant}, {unrestrained}]
>
>>From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
>
>  47 Moby Thesaurus words for "resplendent":
>     beaming, bedazzling, blazing, blinding, blooming, bright,
>     bright and shining, brilliant, charismatic, dazzling, devastating,
>     divine, effulgent, flamboyant, flaming, fulgent, fulgid, garish,
>     glamorous, glaring, glary, glorious, glowing, gorgeous, heavenly,
>     illustrious, killing, lustrous, magic, magnificent, numinous,
>     proud, radiant, raving, ravishing, refulgent, shining, sparkling,
>     splendent, splendid, splendiferous, splendorous, splendrous,
>     stunning, sublime, superb, vivid
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>And here's who's currently scheduled for next week (Mar 13, 2007):
>
>Please email Alex Klaus at vpe at qctm.org with any necessary changes or
>to get your name added to the schedule.

<snip>


I do not see three pieces in your archive, I see two pieces, and the
split is not at a hyphen line, it is at the "From " line.

The first archive piece is at
<http://qctm.org/pipermail/qctm/2007-March/000318.html> and the second
piece is at <http://qctm.org/pipermail/qctm/2007-March/000319.html>.

I also see a reply to the original post which is split in the same way
at <http://qctm.org/pipermail/qctm/2007-March/000320.html> and
<http://qctm.org/pipermail/qctm/2007-March/000321.html>, and another
reply at <http://qctm.org/pipermail/qctm/2007-March/000322.html> which
is not split because the "From " line is "quoted" in the reply and
thus does not contain "From " in columns 1-5.

I said in my first reply

 A single post should be archived as one message unless it containes
 lines beginning with "From " (*nix mbox separators), but I think the
 current archiver escapes extraneous "From " lines, so even these won't
 cause a single message to be separated in the archive.

For some reason, in your case the "From " line in the body of the
message is not escaped (written as ">From ") when written for the
archiver. Presumably, it is also not escaped when written for delivery
to the list either as it was unescaped in one of the replies.

The actual adding of the initial ">" to lines beginning with "From " is
done by the Python email library. There are known problems resulting
from packagers not including the email library that ships with a
particular Mailman version in Mailman's pythonlib, so it's possible
your Mailman is using an old email library from your Python
installation.

What happens if you do

  bin/withlist -i

and then at the Python (>>>) prompts type

>>> import email
>>> email.__version__

It should print 2.5.8 for Mailman 2.1.9. (Type a control-D to a >>>
prompt to quit.)


In any case, because lines beginning with "From " are mailbox
separators, most MUAs (email clients) will escape such lines in
composed messages, but apparently your MUA doesn't do this.

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