From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Casey Allen Shobe Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 02:38:58 +0000 Subject: Re: footer isn't appended to multipart messages (part II: reality check!) Message-Id: <200507060238.58342.lists@seattleserver.com> List-Id: References: <200507052130.02825.lists@seattleserver.com> In-Reply-To: <200507052130.02825.lists@seattleserver.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: mlmmj@mlmmj.org On Tuesday 05 July 2005 23:32, you wrote: > This is absolutely true- you (that is to say, *we*, that is to > say techie/programmer types) find this stuff very annoying. > However, mailing lists are used by knitting clubs too, and I, for > one, DO NOT want the nightmare of administrating a knitting club > mailing list that has absolutely no dependable notification of > "how to do it yourself". Reality check indeed: knitting club members aren't going to have a clue wtf the reminder mail or appended text means. They don't understand what "unsubscribing from a mailing list" is, they just use a particular address to talk to other club members. If they want off the list, no matter how much you spam them with instructions, they will ask the head of the knitting club to do it. I'm on some lists which append unsubscription messages to every mail, and guess what I see posted there all the time? empty messages with "unsubscribe" subjects (often with unsubscribe misspelled, not that it matters since that's not how the lists work). Reality is, nontechy users have no interest in doing it themselves, and techy users know right well how to find out. Most anyone in between will look up the website where they signed up to try to figure it out. Also, even though Outhouse Express is not yet one of them, many mail clients have built-in support for List-Unsubscribe header which enables a button for unsubscribing from the list. > not sure which "example" you mean The example you asked about: appending footers with subscribe/unsubscribe information. > For other lists, on the contrary, it should be *encouraged* (see > above)! I could not disagree with this statement more. You really think that when I (the idiot user in this example) feel like unsubscribing that I'm going to wait around for the next monthly mail or go digging around for an old one? No, I'm going to whine to the list owner or whomever I think is in charge if I can't figure things out, and probably just the whole list to make sure somebody hears me. > 1) I haven't found the documentation on how to enforce text-only > mailing lists You could filter incoming messages with something like maildrop or your own script. Not sure how you'd go about mingling this with mlmmj, perhaps somebody else can answer that. > 2) not sure what happens on a text-only mlmmj list when a > multi-part msg is sent, but [it] has to handle the > default settings of widespread [...] email clients [...]. Short answer, if you want HTML mail to reach the list, then don't block it. If you care about people seeing signatures on every single mail (even the HTML ones), then don't allow HTML. You can't (easily) have your cake and eat it too. Long answer, you *can* have your cake and eat it too, but it will require substantial work on your part to reduce the messages (which I don't think you're actually willing to do or you might have just implemented multipart footer appending yourself): * Outlook Express sends HTML and text multipart messages by default I believe. You could reduce this to plain text with some parsing, removing the HTML part and leaving the plain text. * At least Thunderbird sends HTML-only mail by default. It's not that hard to go through and strip out HTML tags, since 99.9% of the time, end users never use any custom HTML anyways, and if they do, it's just a font or color and doesn't affect the legibility of the message (except for the worse). * You will run into messages with lots of parts, where people think it's a good idea to tack on a VCF, HTML message, text message, separate parts for their spam filtering mechanism's signature, one for saying the mail passed their lame virus scan, and an image of the company's logo. Good luck with those. Realistic answer, chances are you will never make your knitting club members happy, because the majority of them cannot and will not understand what a mailing list even is. You might come closest with the least effort by just going and signing up for yahoogroups, which even gives you the option to convert all incoming messages to HTML (*shudder*) and appends the dummy footer to every message, and gives them an ad-filled web-interface that they can use instead of email if they want to boot. Another answer, if you just want a monthly/weekly/whatever reminder, just mail the list from a cron job. Cheers, -- Casey Allen Shobe | http://casey.shobe.info cshobe@seattleserver.com | cell 425-443-4653 AIM & Yahoo: SomeLinuxGuy | ICQ: 1494523 SeattleServer.com, Inc. | http://www.seattleserver.com