On 24 November 1998, Trucchi Family <trux(_at_)writeme(_dot_)com> wrote:
Hello everybody!
I manage a mailing list with windsurfing subject, in Italian
language. In the list there are now about 120 people. As I don't have
the possibility of using a computer always connected to Internet,
I pay an US server to keep my list on. The server has got only
Majordomo.
I have many problems with the digest version of my list. Each time
one of the subscribers uses HTML or sends attachments, these come out
perfectly in the normal version of the list but VERY badly in the
digest version. Many people told me that it is Majordomo's fault, and
if I want to solve the problem I have to change the software. I am
also subscribed to a mailing list run with procmail and I can see it
works perfectly.
Questions:
1) Do you think that procmail wouldn't have any problem with messages
containing html and/or attachments? Even in the digest version?
2) As on the US server I pay they can only use Majordomo, do you know
if a similar service is available, with procmail?
You are mixing two completely different things here. Majordomo
is a mailing list manager, and consequently it handles mailing list
administrative operations: subscriptions, moderation, digesting and so
on. It's basically used to _send_ messages to a (usually large) bunch of
people. Procmail is a delivery agent: it can sort your incoming mail
to different folders according to various criteria, munge the headers,
remove spam and occasionally bounce messages to somebody else or handle
simple autoresponder tasks. It's normally used to do something with
_incoming_ messages. Of course, it makes sense for Majordomo to invoke
procmail to remove spam, and, if you are a determined person, you can
also use procmail to create a small mailing list. But the two programs
are _not_ interchangeable, their main scopes are very different.
Now, to answer your questions:
1) Procmail doesn't care whether the incoming messages have MIME
parts or not, unless you specifically tell it to do something with
the attachments, it will just leave them alone. You can use it at
the receiver's end to split digests into messages, but it won't
automatically do anything to recover broken MIME structures.
2) The problem with Majordomo is that it will remove the "boundary"
information from the initial messages. In order to handle MIME messages
in a nice way, you need a mailing list program that keeps the boundaries
around. A program that can do that is ezmlm. It will include the
digested messages as message/rfc822 attachments, thus preserving the
initial MIME structure. The resulting digests are MIME messages whether
the digested items use MIME or not (so people using non-MIME mailers
like ELM will still hate you), but there is essentially no loss of
information, the initial attachments are preserved.
So what you want is an ISP that either provides mailing lists
services with something like ezmlm, or one that allows you to do it
yourself (I suspect it would be cheaper to find one in your country).
If you decide to do it yourself, you'll need
(1) A shell account to run ezmlm (or equivalent) from;
(2) Permission to run offline jobs;
(3) Permission to produce the amount of traffic generated by your list.
Make sure you discuss all these details with the ISP's admin before
starting to move your list.
Regards,
Liviu Daia
--
Dr. Liviu Daia e-mail: daia(_at_)stoilow(_dot_)imar(_dot_)ro
Institute of Mathematics web page: http://www.imar.ro/~daia
of the Romanian Academy PGP key: http://www.imar.ro/~daia/daia.asc