Re: ATTN: Barbara Oncay

[Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2006 at 10:33:58PM -0800, Ken Irving wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 12:28:25AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > 
> > And, how much screwing around would it be to make the listserver actualy 
> > wrap it with the proper mimetype declaration?
> 
> The SmartList (used for the debian lists) FAQ ends with:
> 
>     8.13: Why are MIME and HTML emails a problem for SmartList?
>         ...
>         Body footer:
>         Similar to the previous case, but here the text is injected after
>         the final MIME separator, and so again doesn't belong to any of
>         the MIME message parts.
> 
>         A proper MIME-aware text insertion recipe would have to know
>         how to modify ALL of the text message segments without touching
>         any message segments which contain non-message text data,
>         e.g. attachments.
> 
> So it looks like it means fixing something, somewhere.

SmartList is built around procmail, and formail is used to mung headers
and such.  I think in general the desire is to keep the email body intact,
as received, so little, if any, body munging is done, other than simply
appending the debian unsub tagline.   I can "imagine" some procmail
that would identify a multipart message from the headers, grab the
boundary string, and then open the body, seek to the terminating boundary
delimiter, and insert another section to include the offending tagline.  Any
existing epilogue part included in the message would be retained.   I think
just the boundary lines would be needed (and associated blank lines), as 
content type and encoding would default to plain text.

It's probably not so simple, though...

-- 
Ken Irving