MM attaches mime-attachments to mail as text file since update to 3.3.8
Dear Users & Developers,
we're running MM3 on Ubuntu 22 and used the venv-installation method. Last week we updated via¹ to
Mailman Core-Version GNU Mailman 3.3.8 (Tom Sawyer) Mailman Core API-Version 3.1 Mailman Core Python-Version 3.10.6 (main, Nov 14 2022, 16:10:14) [GCC 11.3.0]
and now mailman attaches mime-attachments to email as text-files. That breaks many mails in our environment.
For example: Now we have attachments like
smime.p7s + ATT000001.txt as well as what looks like MM footers "mailing list --- test@domain ... To unsubscripbe send an email to ..."
How can we get the "old" processing back?
Thank you alot.
Stefan
On 1/17/23 23:45, Stefan Bauer wrote:
Dear Users & Developers,
we're running MM3 on Ubuntu 22 and used the venv-installation method. Last week we updated via¹ to
Mailman Core-Version GNU Mailman 3.3.8 (Tom Sawyer) Mailman Core API-Version 3.1 Mailman Core Python-Version 3.10.6 (main, Nov 14 2022, 16:10:14) [GCC 11.3.0]
and now mailman attaches mime-attachments to email as text-files. That breaks many mails in our environment.
For example: Now we have attachments like
smime.p7s + ATT000001.txt as well as what looks like MM footers "mailing list --- test@domain ... To unsubscripbe send an email to ..."
How can we get the "old" processing back?
I doubt this has anything to do with the upgrade per se. It has to do with MIME multipart (in this case, signed) messages and how MM headers/footers are added. The MM 2.1 FAQ article at <https://wiki.list.org/x/4030707> has some info on this.
In order to say more, I would need to see the list's settings for Filter types, Filter extensions, Pass types, Pass extensions, Collapse alternatives and Convert html to plaintext and the complete MIME structure of the incoming message.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Dear Mark,
thank you for your time.
Here are the lists settings and an example mail attached.
Filter content: NO Filter types: EMPTY Pass types: EMPTY Pass extensions: EMPTY Collapse alterantives: YES Convert html to plaintext: NO
Thunderbird is showing the mail "correct". Outlook does show the attachments as attachments.
Thank you.
Stefan
Am Mi., 18. Jan. 2023 um 18:02 Uhr schrieb Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net>:
On 1/17/23 23:45, Stefan Bauer wrote:
Dear Users & Developers,
we're running MM3 on Ubuntu 22 and used the venv-installation method. Last week we updated via¹ to
Mailman Core-Version GNU Mailman 3.3.8 (Tom Sawyer) Mailman Core API-Version 3.1 Mailman Core Python-Version 3.10.6 (main, Nov 14 2022, 16:10:14) [GCC 11.3.0]
and now mailman attaches mime-attachments to email as text-files. That breaks many mails in our environment.
For example: Now we have attachments like
smime.p7s + ATT000001.txt as well as what looks like MM footers "mailing list --- test@domain ... To unsubscripbe send an email to ..."
How can we get the "old" processing back?
I doubt this has anything to do with the upgrade per se. It has to do with MIME multipart (in this case, signed) messages and how MM headers/footers are added. The MM 2.1 FAQ article at <https://wiki.list.org/x/4030707> has some info on this.
In order to say more, I would need to see the list's settings for Filter types, Filter extensions, Pass types, Pass extensions, Collapse alternatives and Convert html to plaintext and the complete MIME structure of the incoming message.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mailman-users mailing list -- mailman-users@mailman3.org To unsubscribe send an email to mailman-users-leave@mailman3.org https://lists.mailman3.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.mailman3.org/ Archived at: https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/message/...
This message sent to cubewerk@gmail.com
Mailman's content filtering has removed the following MIME parts from this message.
Replaced multipart/alternative part with first alternative.
On 1/23/23 22:50, Stefan Bauer wrote:
Dear Mark,
thank you for your time.
Here are the lists settings and an example mail attached.
Filter content: NO Filter types: EMPTY Pass types: EMPTY Pass extensions: EMPTY Collapse alterantives: YES Convert html to plaintext: NO
Thunderbird is showing the mail "correct". Outlook does show the attachments as attachments.
So Filter content is NO so Mailman isn't doing any content filtering. All it is doing is adding headers and footers if any, and if the original message is other than a single text/plain part, these will be added as separate MIME text/plain parts. For a discussion on why this is done, see https://wiki.list.org/x/4030707 which is written for MM 2.1, but which applies at least generally to MM 3.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Stefan Bauer writes:
Collapse alterantives: YES Convert html to plaintext: NO
These options probably delete any plaintext and leave HTML as it is.
Thunderbird is showing the mail "correct". Outlook does show the attachments as attachments.
Note that they're not attachments as defined by MIME, they're labeled "inline" in the Content-Disposition header. The obvious thing for the MUA to do is to display non-HTML inline parts in order vertically, then the HTML part(s), then more non-HTML inline parts, and so on. A Sufficiently Smart MUA can probably make things a bit more attractive. Outlook just doesn't bother at all. :-(
If you must cater to Outlook, the obvious way to handle it is to configure to delete HTML parts unless they are the only text part, and in that case convert HTML to plain text. IIRC that's
Collapse alternatives: YES Convert html to plaintext: YES
If you can legally do so, you can also configure the header and footer to be completely empty (not even white space). But that second option is only useful when you want to remove "ugly" attachment buttons, and can't be used when the footer text is needed.
Before you ask the obvious question: It would be possible to try to do "reasonably user-friendly" handling in Mailman by editing the HTML part instead of adding MIME parts, but I myself won't do this because it almost certainly would result in mangled, at least partially unreadable mail in some cases. In particular, if you need to have the footer displayed for legal reasons, this could make it undisplayable even by competent MUAs like Thunderbird. It would also probably be ugly. I'm not willing to deal with the likely user complaints, nor do I like the risks it would impose on list or site administrators under some laws.
This could be done as a plugin, and if somebody wants to contribute one (and preferably offer support) I would probably support adding it as a contrib feature (that is, if the code is of a certain minimal quality).
Steve
Thank you Mark and Steve,
that helped me a lot to understand the whole process. We noticed that we can remove the MM-specific footer and that did the job. No more attachments in Outlook. *list:member:regular:footer*
thanks to the new template system, this can be done via mm3- web interface. Thats great! :)
Stefan
Am Mi., 25. Jan. 2023 um 07:10 Uhr schrieb Stephen J. Turnbull < stephenjturnbull@gmail.com>:
Stefan Bauer writes:
Collapse alterantives: YES Convert html to plaintext: NO
These options probably delete any plaintext and leave HTML as it is.
Thunderbird is showing the mail "correct". Outlook does show the attachments as attachments.
Note that they're not attachments as defined by MIME, they're labeled "inline" in the Content-Disposition header. The obvious thing for the MUA to do is to display non-HTML inline parts in order vertically, then the HTML part(s), then more non-HTML inline parts, and so on. A Sufficiently Smart MUA can probably make things a bit more attractive. Outlook just doesn't bother at all. :-(
If you must cater to Outlook, the obvious way to handle it is to configure to delete HTML parts unless they are the only text part, and in that case convert HTML to plain text. IIRC that's
Collapse alternatives: YES Convert html to plaintext: YES
If you can legally do so, you can also configure the header and footer to be completely empty (not even white space). But that second option is only useful when you want to remove "ugly" attachment buttons, and can't be used when the footer text is needed.
Before you ask the obvious question: It would be possible to try to do "reasonably user-friendly" handling in Mailman by editing the HTML part instead of adding MIME parts, but I myself won't do this because it almost certainly would result in mangled, at least partially unreadable mail in some cases. In particular, if you need to have the footer displayed for legal reasons, this could make it undisplayable even by competent MUAs like Thunderbird. It would also probably be ugly. I'm not willing to deal with the likely user complaints, nor do I like the risks it would impose on list or site administrators under some laws.
This could be done as a plugin, and if somebody wants to contribute one (and preferably offer support) I would probably support adding it as a contrib feature (that is, if the code is of a certain minimal quality).
Steve
participants (3)
-
Mark Sapiro -
Stefan Bauer -
Stephen J. Turnbull