[Mailman-Users] Issue with text to Mailman list serve

Mark Sapiro mark at msapiro.net
Fri Jan 16 20:53:04 CET 2009


Darren G Pifer wrote:
>
>Mark Sapiro wrote:
>>
>> Thanks, but that by itself doesn't tell me much. It does tell me that
>> Mailman recast the message as multipart mixed, but I already knew
>> that. I need to see the MIME structure of the entire message including
>> all the sub-part headers, but even in the absence of that, focus on
>> the following:
>>
>>   
>I think I finally attached the raw message for you.  Hopefully you can glean
>the information you need from it.


My comments about this are below. Note to list - the attached message
was removed by content filtering, but I received it in my direct copy.
I have summarized the saliant points in my reply.


>> Is the non-working list the only one with a msg_header as well as a
>> msg_footer? If that is the case, try removing the msg_header
>> completely and see if that helps.
>>
>>   
>Did that.  This apparently resolved the issue as the admin owner is happy. 
>However, I am not totally convinced that it is a mail client issue.  I 
>am seeing 4 parts
>in my Thunderbird mail client:
>
>plain text (header)
>plain text (body)
>html (body)
>plain text (footer)


What you are seeing is consistent with the attached message.


>Why would mailman be sending plain text and html attachments? When the
>header is removed, my Thunderbird mail client shows the email message
>as plain text and one attachment, the footer.


Did the message below come directly to you from the list or was it
forwarded to you.  If it came directly from the list, I don't
understand it. Note that the second through fourth parts all have
headers of the form

Content-Type: text/plain; name="ATT00001.c"
Content-Description: ATT00001.c
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="ATT00001.c"; size=1175;
	creation-date="Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:50:12 GMT";
	modification-date="Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:50:12 GMT"

Mailman did not create these headers. What appears to be going on is
that this message is received from the list and opened in an MUA that
identifies the first part as the message body and the remaining 3
parts as attachments. The message is then forwarded from that MUA
resulting in the message you attached.

In particular, the last part is the list's msg_footer, and it has part
headers:

Content-Type: text/plain; name="ATT00003.c"
Content-Description: ATT00003.c
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="ATT00003.c"; size=218;
	creation-date="Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:50:12 GMT";
	modification-date="Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:50:12 GMT"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64


Mailman would have created that "attachment" with only the headers

Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: xxx

with the possible addition of a charset parameter on the Content-Type:
header, and most likely 7bit or 8bit Content-Transfer-Encoding:.

All the other headers and the name= parameter were added after the
message left Mailman.

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



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