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[Chris Hastie <address@concealed>]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Cefiar <address@concealed> wrote
> On Wednesday 21 December 2005 07:12, Jeff Abbott wrote:
> > On Dec 20, 2005, at 3:03 PM, address@concealed wrote:
> > > I specified a footer for one of my groups, and it is consistently
> > > read by
> > > Outlook clients as a separate text attachment. Did I do something
> > > wrong to
> > > prevent it from being placed in-line as part of the message?
> >
> > Check the footer_type in the list's configuration -- if it's not
> > specified it'll likely be the default of "mime" which does, indeed,
> > attach the footer.  Set it to "append" to have it append it to
> > outgoing messages.
>
> Not a criticism, but a note:
> Appending to messages breaks GPG/PGP signatures on the body of messages, as
> the message body is then changed.
I'll add a note to that, with the caveat that I don't actually have 5.1 
installed and haven't studied the code in depth, so it's possible this 
is already covered...

It is not enough to simply test that a message is text/plain and append 
if it is. You also need to consider the Content-Transfer-Encoding and 
the character set and ensure that the footer you are attaching matches 
this. If the CTE is 7-bit it's no good attaching a footer that says 
"Buns only £0.45 in the café all this week!"

MIME is essentially the cleanest way to do the job as you can define the 
CTE and charset for the mime entity that is the footer, but Outlook just 
doesn't work properly. It will only display the first text part in line, 
all others are shown as attachments. Which is even more of a pain when 
you try to insert text at the head of a message. Only your insert is 
displayed by Outlook, the original message ends up appearing as a text 
attachment. Until Microsoft mend their utterly broken software there is 
going to be a problem with message footers, and I wouldn't hold your 
breath waiting for that to happen.

--
Chris Hastie