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
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