[Mailman-Users] Digest indexes

[Mark Sapiro]

On 12/16/2014 10:25 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> 
> One would have to create the TOC as text/html rather than text/plain and
> add links to the various message parts. These can't be anchor tags. Do
> do that would require HTMLifying the entire digest. They could probably
> be RFC2393 mid: references though. That might not be too difficult to
> do, although various popular web mail clients, e.g. gmail, currently
> don't make it possible to open an individual digest message as a
> separate message, so how they would deal with such a digest is unknown.
> 
> I might experiment with this at some point, but I am not optimistic that
> a format can be created that would work with all the freemail clients.


There's a typo above. The correct RFC is RFC2392.

That notwithstanding, I tried taking a normal MIME digest and changing
the Content-Type of the TOC part from text/plain to text/html and
changing the actual raw TOC from:

Today's Topics:

   1. Subject 1 (Author)
   2. Subject 2 (Author)
   3. Subject 3 (Author)
   4. Subject 4 (Author)
   ...

to:

Today's Topics:
<ol>
   <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 1 (Author)</a>
   <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 2 (Author)</a>
   <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 3 (Author)</a>
   <li> <a href="mid:..."> Subject 4 (Author)</a>
   ...
</ol>

where "mid:..." referenced the actual Message-IDs of the messages. I
then opened that message with Thunderbird and it presented a nice
looking TOC with links, but when I clicked one, it asked me for an
application to handle the mid: URL scheme.

I then tried adding Content-ID: headers to the messages and referencing
those with cid:... URLs. This time Thunderbird at least understood what
cid: was, but hovering over the link showed the target as 'about:blank'
and clicking it went nowhere.

I didn't bother trying any other MUAs, but I conclude that this
approach, while easy to implement and still producing an RFC 2046
compliant message, is only going to be of benefit with limited if any MUAs.

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