The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Chris Hastie <address@concealed>]

On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Adam Bernstein <address@concealed> wrote
> > My guess (and it is a guess - I haven't studied the code at all) is that
> > this would be a lot trickier than it sounds. If your list gets four
> > messages using four different character sets, one using
> > content-transfer-encoding of 7bit, one of 8bit, one of quoted-printable
> > and one of base64, which character set and CTE would your plain text
> > digest use? And what if some of the list messages include attachments or
> > are of the dreaded multipart/alternative content-type?
>
> I've thought about HTML in messages and attachments, and I was going
> to get to those once I worked this out: they should just be stripped
> out, leaving text only, which I don't think is too hard.

How are you planning on doing this? Ideally it should be done in the 
code within List.pm itself - is this what you have in mind? Or are you 
going to pipe the message through some sort of filter afterwards?

>  Character
> encoding I hadn't thought about, but let's just say I don't care
> that much -- I'm willing to make some assumptions and ignore some
> potential problems.

Well it turns out even the multipart/digest digests from Sympa have some 
problems in this respect - more on that elsewhere...
> I mean, Topica, Yahoo, Mailman, and just about every other listserver
> somehow manages to do text digests (with varying success, I grant),
> and it's absurd that Sympa can't.  As far as I know at the moment, AOL
> and Hotmail (and maybe Yahoo?) users are all unable to read Sympa MIME
> digests, or at least to read them comfortably.  Any rough solution is
> better than that.
Do these systems deal more comfortably with, say, a multipart/mixed 
message consisting of a text/plain TOC and a load of message/rfc822 
parts, loosing the multipart/digest layer altogether? If so, that would 
be trivial to achieve with a few adjustments to the digest template.

> So, any help for this ARRAY 0xXXXXX problem when including [body]?
[m->body] is a reference to the result of the body method of 
Mail::Internet. This apparently

"Returns the body of the message. This is a reference to an array. Each 
entry in the array represents a single line in the message."

So did you try:

[FOREACH m IN msg_list]

[FOREACH l IN m->body]
[l]
[END]

[END]

It's an untested guess - hope it helps.

You probably want to be digging into sub send_msg_digest in List.pm and 
manipulating the Mail::Internet objects with MIME::Parser etc to dump 
your unwanted body parts and provide you with a string for the message 
bodies.
--
Chris Hastie