Making sympa footers work

[wgseligman]

I have difficulty getting footers to work. The instructions are clear enough, and I think I followed them, but I don't get footers in the emails that sympa sends out.

Here are the details:

I'm running AlmaLinux 9 (an RPM-based Redhat distribution). The version is sympa-6.2.72-2, as distributed by EPEL.

The contents of the directory /var/lib/sympa/list_data/listserv.example.com/example-list are:

# ls -lh
total 72K
drwxr-x--- 2 sympa sympa 4.0K Aug  4 15:12 archives
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  725 Aug  5 18:01 config
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  727 Aug  5 17:30 config~
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  523 Aug  4 08:06 config.0
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  593 Aug  4 08:06 config.1
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  621 Aug  5 11:58 config.2
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  707 Aug  5 13:45 config.3
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  723 Aug  5 17:27 config.4
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  723 Aug  5 17:29 config.5
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  725 Aug  5 17:33 config.6
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa  727 Aug  5 17:37 config.7
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa    0 Aug  4 08:06 editor.dump
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa   58 Aug  4 08:06 info
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa   79 Aug  5 13:43 message.footer
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa   79 Aug  5 13:43 message_footer
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa   79 Aug  5 13:43 message_footer.mime
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa    9 Aug  5 19:41 msg_count
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa   96 Aug  4 08:06 owner.dump
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa   20 Aug  5 19:41 stats

You can see that I've edited the config file, both manually via an editor and via the web interface, testing various parameters. You can also see that I attempted all the names I could find for the footer file from web searches. The contents of message.footer, message_footer, and message_footer.mime are identical:

[% listname %]@[% domain %]
Example mailing-list server: [% wwsympa_url %]/lists

The lines in config that I believe are relevant:

footer_type mime

personalization_feature on

personalization
mail_apply_on footer
web_apply_on footer

This feels like I've overlooked something trivial. Can anyone spot my mistake?

[wgseligman]

After much testing, I think I have my answer.

First, I should not have used footer_type mime. According to this reference from 2014, that's only appropriate if the contents of message_footer.mime is already in MIME format. I may experiment with that later, but right now I'd just like to see the footers appear.

Next, I finally got the footer to appear. The issue wasn't the configuration I described in my original post. The issue is that I normally send my emails digitally signed, with a mime.p7s extension. When I turned off digital signing for my emails before I sent them, the footers appeared at the end.

That makes sense. A message's digital signature can't be valid if the contents of the message are changed, correct? Or does that only apply if the message is encrypted, as opposed to the digital certificate?

Anyway, problem solved. If I figure out how to make a MIME attachment, I'll see if that works in addition to a digital certificate.

[wgseligman]

Making a MIME attachment of my desired footer was easier than I thought. I put this in message_footer.mime:

Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="_x_1234567890"
Content-Disposition: inline

This is an alternative MIME format

--_x_1234567890
Content-Type: text/plain;
Content-Disposition: inline

[% listname %]@[% domain %]
Example mailing-list server: [% wwsympa_url %]/lists

--_x_1234567890--

That indeed appended that text as a MIME attachment to my emails.

Unfortunately, that still did not appear if I sent an email to this list with my digital signature.

Is this a bug or a feature? Or is there some special formatting for a MIME attachment that might be potentially added to a message with an existing MIME attachment?

[wgseligman]

... and (sigh) my final answer is here:

Sympa does not alter signed messages: Decoration (adding "header" and "footer") and personalization are not applied to messages delivered with standard reception mode (see also "Does Sympa alter messages?").

So there's no general way to do what I'd like to do. Fortunately, I believe I'm the only one at my site who digitally signs their emails.