[Mailman-Users] MIME digests problem?

Rob Lingelbach rob at colorist.org
Tue Dec 6 03:16:24 CET 2011


could the following be directly related to the toggle between MIME digests and plain-text ones?

(herewith the question)

I've been using mailman for a very long time, since I migrated from SmartList maybe 12 years ago.  

I have a multi-question topic that takes a few questions and combines them into a cohesive whole.

This is what I'd like to ask:

1) My main mailinglist runs to about 2000 subscribers.  I would say perhaps it's evenly split between those who would like to have something more blog-ish (web-based) and those who would like to have it remain email-based.  However, I've just noticed something on a user's cellphone-based email and their web-based email; this is one of the people who would like me to move the whole interface to Facebook.  (and I have spent years developing the wiki associated with this mailinglist!).  (see http://www.colorist.org/wiki )  Now I think FB has its place, but this is a professional forum where almost instantaneous answers that come from mailman's email-based design are very valuable to that half of the community who use it for asking important questions that are answered in literally, a moment or two.   Yet I just looked at this particular user's celphone (Android) message queue, (he subscribes to the digest) and saw that the digests he's getting are empty attachments indicating 2k in length (I forced one out that is about 8 pages to test).   Then he also complained that on Earthlink's "Webmail" he gets his digests not with concatenated text like I'm used to seeing, but with no text in the message and instead, an "Attachments" header that lists each message (horizontally) as "Forwarded message"  "Forwarded message" etc.   (which when clicked, show the messages, supposedly).   He hates this of course.

For what it's worth, he says Outlook exhibits the same behavior as Earthlink's Webmail.

So I'm wondering, has something changed in the way the RFCs are not being honored; are digests not 'homogenous' across platforms any more; is there a way to fix this behavior which may be affecting others?

Thank you to Barry, et al., for maintaining Mailman.  btw I'm running 2.1.12 on CentOS.  

Rob Lingelbach
rob at colorist.org


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