mailto mailcommand: 2 bug fixes + 2 proposals

From: <jose.kahan_at_w3.org_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 01:49:22 +0100 (MET)
Message-Id: <199912170049.BAA09088_at_tuvalu.inrialpes.fr>

Hello fellow hypermailers,

I suppose everyone's converting to 2.x.x to avoid y2k bugs, and hence the silence in the list. Guess what? I'm doing the same thing :)

Here are some bug fixes and propositions on the use of the mailto mailcommand option.

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Mailto mail command bug

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defaults.h.in:

says:

   #define MAILCOMMAND "mailto:$TO?subject=$SUBJECT&replyto=$ID"

should be:

#define MAILCOMMAND "mailto:$TO?Subject=$SUBJECT&In-Reply-To=<$ID>"

The upper case isn't necessary, but it looks much more like headers. The < and > around $ID make it look the same as when using other mailers. NS seems broken in that it doesn't understand this header.

and more precisely:

#define MAILCOMMAND "mailto:$TO?Subject=$SUBJECT&amp;In-Reply-To=&lt;$ID&gt;"

so that it is valid HTML. Some chars are encoded in the mailcommand function, but not so for the '&', '<', and '>' chars. While pending to find more time for a better analysis if we should convert those chars too in mailcommand, I "hard-coded" them in defaults.h.

Status: to be committed tomorrow.

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mailto out of Message-Id

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Hypermail adds special mailtos in the From:, To:, and Cc: headers. Each time you can reply to any of the email addresses given in those headers with the mailto specifing the subject and other headers.

However, one bug is that this is also happening for the Message-Id header. I don't think we want to find out that mr msgid has a big family, each one with a different name, and we surely don't want to write them because they rarely answer their mail :)

So, I patched hypermail to avoid doing it so in this case.

Status: to be committed tomorrow

Follow up:

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New line of commands

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This is in complement to the mailtos: we're already adding to the headers that have email addresses.

We already have this in the table, but not in the non-table format: a link for replying to the message, and another one for sending mail to the list.

I propose to add a new list item to allow to do so:

 [ new message] [ reply to list ] [ reply to author ]

One of my users commentted that otherwise, it's not intuitive to know where to click or what the link does.

We already have all the info for doing this, so if people agree (let's say 3 YES votes, no NO vote), I'll add it to the base. It's not a big modification and won't fragilize anything (point of view from someone who knows the code).

What do you think?

-Jose Received on Fri 17 Dec 1999 02:50:25 AM GMT