Mailing List Summary

Stanley Hopcroft Stanley.Hopcroft at IPAustralia.Gov.AU
Sat Jan 29 10:42:26 CET 2005


> 
> nuffers at tsainc.com wrote:
> > Does anybody else have problems with the summary distribution of the 
> > mailing list activity.

Yep. But the only problem is that a digest ('summary distribution') of 
Nagios-users gets trashed if the ratio of HTML/quoted printable/Base64 
etc is greater than about 10%.

> > 
> > I get a lot of HTML code and other annoying symbols.  Is it my client or 
> > have I requested the wrong format when I subscribed?
> >

You have done nothing wrong; the digest preserves all the parts of a 
multi-part letter. Moreover since the digest is simply a sequence of 
letters - not a set of multi-parts corresponding to each letter - no 
mailer could render it properly.

Unfortunately, digests suck if people post multi-part.

People post in multi-part because perhaps they are unaware that their 
mailer is sending it, or because they don't see what it does to the 
digests,

Here's an example

To: <nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net>
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 20:24:53 +0530
Subject: [Nagios-users] (no subject)

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_020C_01C35AC6.76B2A730
Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

hi,
 i am new to this list i am facing some problem in starting nagios i get 
=
the following message
Checking service dependencies...
Error: Dependent service specified in service dependency for service =
'Website #2' on host 'nt1' is not defined anywhere!

Error: Service specified in service dependency for service 'Website #2' 
=
on host 'nt1' is not defined anywhere
........
about 12 errors are generated.
kindly do help
ranjansimon
------=_NextPart_000_020C_01C35AC6.76B2A730
Content-Type: text/html;
        charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=3DContent-Type content=3D"text/html; =
charset=3Diso-8859-1">
<META content=3D"MSHTML 6.00.2800.1106" name=3DGENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>  
<BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>hi,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2> i am new to this list i am facing 
=
some=20
problem in starting nagios i get the following message</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>Checking service =
dependencies...</FONT></DIV><FONT=20
face=3DArial size=3D2>
<DIV>Error: Dependent service specified in service dependency for =
service=20
'Website #2' on host 'nt1' is not defined anywhere!</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Error: Service specified in service dependency for service 'Website 
=
#2' on=20
host 'nt1' is not defined anywhere</DIV>
<DIV>........</DIV>
<DIV>about 12 errors are generated.</DIV>
<DIV>kindly do help</DIV>
<DIV>ranjansimon</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>

------=_NextPart_000_020C_01C35AC6.76B2A730--


Obviously this makes the digest difficult to use. No one who sends such 
a letter should expect an answer.

What can you do ?

It's not your client or the format you requested. All you can do is,

1 Write a program to parse the digest and eject non plain text parts

2 Don't get the digest - then the multi-part will be either rendered or 
hidden by your mailer

3 Politely suggest that people use plain text when they post. Some 
people are genuinely unaware of this and respond positively to a private 
post.

Yours sincerely.

-- 
Stanley Hopcroft

IP Australia
Ph: (02) 6283 3189  Fax: (02) 6281 1353
PO Box 200 Woden  ACT 2606
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: disclaimer.txt
URL: <https://www.monitoring-lists.org/archive/users/attachments/20050129/59bacaca/attachment.txt>


More information about the Users mailing list