Edit held message header/body

[anser]

Here is my preliminary (brute force) patch to allow
full editing of headers and bodies of messages being
held for approval in Mailman 2.1 (as of beta 5). I
have released versions of this for 1.x and 2.0.x but
wanted to wait until 2.1 was fairly stable before
releasing this one.

You must set HOLD_MESSAGES_AS_PICKLES = 0 in your
installation's mm_cfg.py for this to work. I may
support pickles in a future version. Personally I
don't see that much performance difference anyway, not
on the held stuff... Also note that if you had
HOLD_MESSAGES_AS_PICKLES = 1 (the default) when you
created a list, you must recreate it after changing
that variable. (Learned the hard way)

This patch overrides the ADMINDB_PAGE_TEXT_LIMIT
setting, so if you have megabyte messages being held,
be ready to wait.

Also - this version doesn't change the request
database, so if you change the Subject: header you
won't see the change reflected in the summary list (but
it will be sent out your way when you Approve).

Happy mailmanning!

[anser (anser)]

The file edit_patch was added: Patch file (diff -c)

[bwarsaw (bwarsaw)]

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I'm moving this to the 2.2/3.0 group since we're in feature
freeze for 2.1

[anser (anser)]

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The problem with moving this to 2.2/3.0 is that I actually
have no way of knowing whether it will work with 2.2/3.0 -
it is based on 2.1. I actually don't expect this feature to
ever be folder into "official" Mailman since editing the
envelope is apparently considered heresy :) but I want the
patch to be available for people who need it. Just so it
stops moving so I can post the URL...

[bwarsaw (bwarsaw)]

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Don't worry, MM2.2/3.0 is currently a figment of my
imagination. I just needed to do this for triage purposes,
and I doubt any of the code involved will change radically
before 2.1 final is out. We can move it back to the 2.1
group when that's done (SF doesn't give me enough
classification options here unfortunately).

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Here's a 'diff -u' which is the original patch, but against the base at rev 1806, and with one slight change making the override of ADMINDB_PAGE_TEXT_LIMIT with -1 contingent on HOLD_MESSAGES_AS_PICKLES == 0 which latter setting is required for this to work at all.

This patch will apply cleanly, but is untested and comes with no assertions as to its efficacy.

[Jim Popovitch (jimpop)]

I feel like there should be something between comment #4 and comment #5 other than time. :-)

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

I actually did a simple test of the latest patch and it has issues.

Things like '<' and '>' in headers become html entities so you wind up with headers like

Message-ID: &lt;....&gt;
To: My List &lt;<email address hidden>&gt;

in the delivered post which don't work well for replies.

More significantly, this will really only work for messages which are single part text/plain. For multipart messages, all part headers will be lost and all part contents will be collapsed into one part.