[hypermail] Attachments index

From: Crispen, Bob <Robert.Crispen_at_HSV.Boeing.com_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 13:40:44 -0600
Message-Id: <ADC9269D74C5D011A41F00805FEA40E8046CDC42_at_xch-hsv-02.hv.boeing.com>

I've been thinking about something. As a group of people collaborate using a majordomo (etc.) list, they sometimes type plain text messages, but a number of the groups I've got here on my server also share documents through the list.

The documents are part of the group's history, and are often the most important products of the group and the things a new person to the list needs to know about first. The trouble is, if the group has been talkative, it takes quite a while to weed through all the messages using the existing indexes to find the ones with attachments.

So I think it might be useful to have a page that has links only to messages with attachments. It's important to link the messages, and not just the attachments, because the metadata for the document often exists nowhere but in the message that accompanies the document.

I'd thought about using the existing indexes and marking the subject lines of messages that have attachments, but in the end I decided an attachments index would be easier to use. And too, the proper way to mark attachments if we just annotated subject lines on existing indexes is with an icon, but one of the nicest things about hypermail is that in some installations there's only one file for admins to manage: the hypermail executable. Adding an icon would effectively double the number of files those admins have to manage.

I'm at work on a change to print.c (and a small change to hypermail.c) that will add an index page for messages that have attachments.

I'm also going to do it the right way and put any strings in lang.h. But I'll tell you what -- that's nasty. I'm gonna stick some empty strings in the array at appropriate places so the next person along doesn't have this aggravation. Of course, if that turns out to be impossible, I imagine I'll find it out pretty quickly ;-)

I started with the hypermail-2b30.tar.gz distribution. Alas, cvs can't get through the firewall here, so I'll test all my changes here, then send it to my house where I can use WinCvs to check out the originals, substitute my changes, do a little sanity-testing, and check it back in.

First off, am I using the right codebase, or should I start with something else? Second, do I have permission to check stuff in once I confirm it works, or should I send it to someone?

Also, if you could let me know what you have in mind for release milestones, I'll do my best to get it in, or else put it off until after the release if one's imminent.

But first things first. If I'm the only one who thinks an index of messages with attachments might be useful, I'll just keep the changes here and save everybody the trouble.

Bob Crispen
bob.crispen_at_boeing.com Received on Tue 12 Dec 2000 09:45:46 PM GMT