On Mon, 19 Jun 1995 08:10:17 -0700 "Kevin J. Sinclair" <[log in to unmask]>
said:
 
>What I most  want is a banner  on the digest version of  the lists. Will
>TOP_BANNER/BOTTOM_BANNER  appear  on  every  mail  message,  and  digest
>message? Or can the regular mail and the digestified mail have different
>banners?
 
Both appear on all messages in the digest, for different reasons. The top
banner is intended to carry copyright statements, legal warnings, and the
like. We had customers who simply couldn't have used the software without
this capability.  In most cases this  would be just a  one-liner. Lawyers
don't want  to take  chances so  this has to  appear on  every individual
message. Otherwise if  you extracted one message from the  digest in good
faith it would  not have the copyright,  and what if you  then resent it,
who would  be to  blame, and  what if  you're using  a mail  program that
automatically bursts digests, blah blah blah. I don't think this is a big
problem since the top  banner gets in the way of  reading the text you're
actually interested in, so you want to  keep it short anyway, and if it's
just 1-2 lines it  is no big deal if it appears  on every single message,
even if it's not a copyright that you do have to have on every message.
 
The  bottom banner  is for  signoff instructions,  any info  you care  to
provide,  sponsor acknowledgements,  etc. On  digests it  appears on  all
messages rather  than at the bottom  of the digest because  the bottom of
the digest is  normally thrown away by unburst programs.  That is, people
with a mail  interface that automatically bursts digests  would never see
it (and with MIME this will become the  norm, I mean in the long run when
we switch to  MIME digest format). Actually, what you  probably want is a
setup where people  who read the digest  as a single big  file don't have
the multiple  bottom banner,  but people  who read  it with  an automatic
unburster   that  trims   the  "superfluous"   information  do   see  it.
Unfortunately it's  hard for LISTSERV to  know which is which.  I suspect
that in a future version, when MIME digest format is introduced as a user
selectable  option, we'll  have  MIME  digests carry  the  banner on  the
assumption that they'll be split  automatically, and we'll remove it from
the  standard digests.  It's a  tough decision  though because  there are
people who burst standard digests manually too.
 
Anyway  you can  add a  custom digest  header by  creating a  file called
listname.DIGEST-H. You can't add a  digest trailing because it's supposed
to be discarded and in fact you're not supposed to put anything after the
end of the digest.
 
  Eric