Re: Ideas

Craig A Summerhill wrote:

> It occurs to me that one of the first things you need to do is to get
> some sense of prioritization on that list of proposed enhancements.
> In that manner, you can perhaps break it into manageable chunks.

I agree with that. Depending on how isolated the chunks can get, and how much changes they need, different people could be handed the responsibility for the different chunks.

> 1) Full MIME compliance -- a year ago, this was way down on my
> list.

I am Swedish, we use letters above the US-ASCII ones very frequently. The first thing I did when I downloaded hypermail the first time was to get shocked by the fact that it didn't do MIME. All archives got filled with ==EF, ==3D and similar odd codes.

I added MIME-awareness to my hypermail. I also made the header parsing deal with the MIME things. I can't recall right now to which extent, but it is mainly fixed to work properly with ISO-8859-1.

> (Microsoft seems to have made a decision to encode *everything* as
> MIME by default -- even if it is simply ASCII text with multipart
> MIME boundaries.)

I made it support multipart mails, although my implementation has a few flaws. Everything that isn't text gets replaced with a single line in the output HTML saying that a binary attachment was stripped out (I think it needs further discussion on what to do with binary data in mails. Pictures and stuff should be treated better, but what about other things?). Also, my parser takes all langauges and just convert them to 8-bit, not really caring about the language name, which also is a bad thing.

> But until
> there is MIME compatibility in the HTML markup, these people
> are at a disadvantage.

Our mailing list archives were completely impossible to read or use before MIME was added.

> 3) Configurable Setting (.hmrc file) to a Pointer/URL for Custom
> Header and Footer Files

I've missed this feature too.

Just a note while I'm writing. Judging from the source code I've read and patched in hypermail, I am voting for a complete re-write of the project. It is not in a great shape, and when all these change requests come flying in and is supposed to get added onto the existing code, it'll get even messier.

And hey, thanks for taking on the project, I can't wait to see it move...

-- 
          Daniel Stenberg  -  Software, Network and Unix
    GSM: +46 - 708 - 31 77 42   http://www.fts.frontec.se/~dast