Hello listserv members. One of our listserv colleagues wrote to me yesterday to say:
An issue I have been having with these listservs, for as long as I can remember, is the inability to view all the messages in MIME format when Digest is turned on.
The purpose of this page is to discuss my efforts to be responsive to this colleague.
There are at least three things that I don’t understand very well about this issue.
A first challenge is that I have never used digest mode, and so I just do not have a very clear sense of what it is like to use digest mode.
A second challenge is that I must imagine that the reader experience for a listserv member who has selected digest mode must be strikingly different depending on which email client one is using. I use Thunderbird, for example. Another user might use some Microsoft product (Outlook?) as their email client. Still another might use a Gmail web browser as their email client. Others use Roundcube as their email client. I would be astonished if there were not striking differences in terms of the reader experience across various viewing platforms.
Having said all of this, I just now realized there is a third challenge. The server software that I use for the listservs is software called Mailman. It has a configuration value (seen at right) called “mime_is_default_digest”. I have never paid any attention to this configuration value for any of our production listservs. I don’t know but I guess that in the Mailman system the default for this variable must be “Plain”. In the Mailman documentation, you can read about this “mime_is_default_digest” variable here.
The main point of the page that you are viewing right now is that I am thinking about possibly changing it, for one or more of the public listservs, to be “MIME”.
For a moment I considered changing this variable, in one or another of our existing active listservs, as an experiment. But then I decided I ought not to do that. I fear it might be very disruptive for digest members of an existing active listserv for me to change this variable without warning.
I have just now created a non-public “testing” listserv. I have set the variable “mime_is_default_digest” for the “testing” listserv to “MIME” instead of what I guess is the default value, namely “Plain”. The user management page for the “testing” listserv is https://oppedahl-lists.com/mailman/listinfo/testing_oppedahl-lists.com .
I invite members of our production listservs who regularly use “digest mode” to consider joining this “testing” listserv in digest mode. You could then try posting a number of messages to that testing listserv and you could see what the digest postings look like. In this way we can get get some consensus as to whether it would be a good idea to change the production listervs over to “MIME” mode rather than “plain” mode.