HTML and non-text attachments (was: Thank you for the kind and helpful community)

On 08/11/2022 05:22, Ian Smith wrote:
> On 8 November 2022 10:06:49 am AEDT, Graham Perrin<grahamperrin@freebsd.org>  wrote:
>   > On 06/11/2022 21:16,iio7@tutanota.com  wrote:
>   > > I just want to say thank you to the FreeBSD core team, the FreeBSD
>   > > developers, and the FreeBSD community in general for everyone's
>   > patience
>   > > and for providing a friendly, helpful and inviting community. It is
>   > > hard to find elsewhere.
>
> [trim, and cc: hackers@ removed]
>
>   > Thank you.
>   >
>   > For reference, here's an email that probably failed to reach the
>   > addressee – it was neither returned to sender, nor archived:
>   ><https://wiki.freebsd.org/GrahamPerrin/email?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Message-ID+a2b48731-62c0-d2e6-1369-de420d015fb6.eml>
>   >
>   > (message/rfc822, .eml from Thunderbird).
>
> As this list drops HTML


Not exactly.

Quoting Baptiste Daroussin (Postmaster Team 
<https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-postmaster>): "/… the mailing 
list engine will reject html only email, html is fine as long at it is 
created with text/plain alternative. …/".

A screenshot of this e-mail, before sending: 
<https://wiki.freebsd.org/GrahamPerrin/email?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=2022-11-12+10.47+freebsd-questions.png>. 


> and non-text attachments like your .png,


freebsd-questions does accept non-text attachments such as JPEG and PNG.

Please see, for example, photo_2021-10-06_10-36-41.jpg 
<https://markmail.org/download.xqy?id=4seqjbjwu6rzhvvo&number=1> 
(image/jpeg, Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64) within the original 
<https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-questions/2021-October/000011.txt> 
of 
<https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-questions/2021-October/000011.html>. 


A more recent example: the base64-encoded image/png that's invisible at 
<https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-questions/2022-October/001986.html> 
is visible at <http://markmail.org/message/h5htrf2lolh5o52m>.

> sending to desired recipients cc: questions - as you did on this one - would have at least reached them?
>
> Does hackers@ publish and/or archive graphic attachments?


See for example <http://markmail.org/message/vxxhadn6j7lrfa46> and the 
first reply. Both with PNG attachments, User-Agent: Alpine 2.20 (BSF 67 
2015-01-07); Alpine <https://alpineapp.email/>.

Corresponding 
<https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2019-December/055358.html> 
included a visible hint that there exists a PNG. 
application/octet-stream, so (for example) whilst the resulting 
attachment.obj is not visible as a PNG in Firefox, it can be opened with 
Okular, GIMP and so on.

> Your message (the .eml) referred to above did have a base64 text part.
> Perhaps it would be better if the list software returned non-text parts, though it would get busy with HTML?
>
> ISTR Mailman used to mention but then ignore non-plaintext parts. Still missing Mailman functionality, esp. re archiving; I used to browse various other lists quite often.
>
> HTH, Ian