Unfortunately, this problem has no obvious solution. There are fundamentally three things an editor can do with a submitted message (possibly after some intermediary steps, like private e-mail to the poster or whatever):

1. Accept it for distribution as it is.
2. Reject it.
3. Submit an edited version.

"Send= Editor,Hold" was developed to make option 1 easy for editors who use e-mail clients that do not support "Resent-" tags. Option 2 is inherently easy, since nothing will be posted unless the editor takes action. Although you can reject the message explicitly, it is sufficient to press the delete button. The biggest challenge is option 3.

With "Send= Editor,Hold", it is possible, but not always easy, to edit incoming messages, including MIME messages. The more MIME in the message, the more difficult it is to edit it, but this difficulty is inherent to the content. For instance, if you want to edit an image or a sound clip, you are going to need specialized software; if you want to edit an Excel spreadsheet, you need Excel on your computer. Even a mundane HTML mail message can be a challenge if you do not have the same e-mail program as the poster. Editing multipart/alternative content is even more difficult because your mail program will only show you one of the variants.

By and large, the main reason people use "Send= Editor" rather than "Send= Editor,Hold" is because it makes it easier to edit simple plain text messages. All you have to do is change the text before sending it. The reason it is easy is that the message is essentially forwarded as is, with a notice at the top, rather than enclosed as an attachment. With some mail clients, it is a lot less keystrokes or dragging and dropping. This works very well with plain text, but it doesn't work with MIME, at least not with sophisticated multipart messages. The notice is in the prologue and the mail client does not show it.

In the general case, there is only one way to make the notice visible: create a new multipart message with the notice as a first text part and the original message as an attachment. Some simpler variations are possible in the case where the message is multipart/mixed rather than multipart/alternative, but this is the basic framework. Once modified in this manner, the message becomes more difficult to accept without editing. It also becomes difficult to edit, but that is again inherent to the content.

The solution I would propose is to change LISTSERV to make "Send= Editor" work as "Send= Editor,Hold" in the case of multipart HTML messages. What do you Karen and others think?

  Eric