[Mailman-Users] mailman violates RFC 1153?

[Mark Sapiro]

Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>
>He sent me a sample digest, which ends like this:
>
>    ------------------------------
>
>    --
>    test mailing list
>    test at lists.fedoraproject.org
>    https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
>
>    End of test Digest, Vol 93, Issue 20
>    ************************************
>
>RFC 1153 has this to say about the digest trailer (emphasis added by me):
[...]
>I looked at the mailman source code and it doesn't appear that the 
>Fedora Project is running a hacked version; it appears that the standard 
>Mailman source code inserts the list footer as shown above as part of 
>the digest trailer, in violation of the RFC.


And if you looked at the source, you should have seen the following
comment immediately preceding the adding of the footer.

# BAW: This is not strictly conformant RFC 1153.  The trailer is only
# supposed to contain two lines, i.e. the "End of ... Digest" line and
# the row of asterisks.  If this screws up MUAs, the solution is to
# add the footer as the last message in the RFC 1153 digest.  I just
# hate the way that VM does that and I think it's confusing to users,
# so don't do it unless there's a clamor.


>I can and will work around this violation of the standard in my code, 
>but it makes the code significantly more complicated, and it's kind of 
>annoying to see the RFC being violated like this.


If you are intending to raise a clamor, you can file a bug report at
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+filebug>.

Suppose the above were changed to

     ------------------------------

     Digest-Footer:

     --
     test mailing list
     test at lists.fedoraproject.org
     https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test

     ------------------------------

     End of test Digest, Vol 93, Issue 20
     ************************************

Would your code handle that or would it complain the Digest-Footer: is
not an allowable header and/or none of Date:, From:, To:, Cc:,
Subject:, Message-ID: and Keywords: were included?

What if it were just

     ------------------------------


     --
     test mailing list
     test at lists.fedoraproject.org
     https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test

     ------------------------------

     End of test Digest, Vol 93, Issue 20
     ************************************




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