Re: ATTN: Barbara Oncay

[Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 10:21:30AM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 01:38:31AM -0400, Steve C. Lamb wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 02:04:34PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > > I think the consensus was that some MUA's show it and some don't but
> > > that mostly it was caused by pgp signing. That is a pgp-signed message
> > > may or may not show it depending on the MUA used. However, if you look
> > > at the message source, you will see it there regardless of what is
> > > shown in the normal view. 
> > 
> >     Actually, more precisely, it isn't PGP signing it is MIME encapsulation of
> > a multi-part message.  It just so happens that on this list the most often
> > seen multi-part message is PGP signatures.  However one could PGP sign their
> > message in-line (AKA, the old way) and I believe the appended text would show
> > up.  By the same token one could post to this list a multi-part HTML message
> > with no PGP signature and the appended text would not show up.
> > 
> 
> you are right. my mistake.
> 
> It still seems to me that the solution is to have the list system
> append a fully formed attachement instead of a plain text
> footer. Maybe that is more complicated than I think it is.

I offered a quick & dirty procmail hack under bug #345283, but there's
probably/apparently more involved than I'm aware of.  The SmartList FAQ
(last question) addresses the issue, more or less saying they don't want
to mess with MIME multipart messages, so leave the issue w/o resolution.
SmartList is built around procmail, so the actual procmail scripts on
the debian servers hold the answers to how things are actually done;
I assume only the list managers have access to those details, so there's
not much more I can think of doing to work on a/the solution.

Some considerations might be: how to strip the canned footer from
replies, whether plain text or MIME (I don't know if this is done);
getting the procmail matching recipe right (my hack assumes quotes around
the defining boundary string in the headers, but those are optional
according to rfc2045); what might happen in various messed-up-MIME cases
(I don't think this should be a problem, but what do I know...).  I only
mess with email and procmail on my own little boxes, so don't know the
ins and outs of managing a huge and busy mailing list.  But my guess is
that eventually something will probably be done.

-- 
Ken Irving