[Rhodes22-list] Web Interface: Attachments

[Peter Nyberg]

When you send an email with an attachment to ‘rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org’, the Mailman server will store a copy of the attachment locally, then strips the attachment from the email and inserts a link to the stored attachment in its place, and then sends the modified email off to all the list members, and to the archives. 

The new web interface, and its supporting background processes, don’t change any of this.  When archived messages are processed and stored in the rhodes22.net database, the links to attachments are found and included in the new format.  Though I like to think that the web interface displays the link in a more straightforward way.

See this recent example for instance: https://www.rhodes22.net/test-env/email-archives.html?post=109262

So nothing has really changed, unless the original attachment was sent through the Nabble interface.

For those not aware, Nabble was a website that provided a graphical interface to the Rhodes22 email list, somewhat like rhodes22.net.  The major difference is that Nabble was run totally independently, and we had no control over how it operated.  This really had little practical impact, except for the matter of attachments.

When an email with an attachment was sent to the list from Nabble, it was Nabble that kept the attachment and inserted a link in its place.  This still worked, people could click on the links and see the attachments, until Nabble lost years worth of attachments.  New, fresh links worked, but links embedded in messages stored in the archives no longer did.  

With this experience in mind, when I wrote the process that pulls messages from the Mailman archives, I decided that I would treat messages with attachments stored in Nabble differently.  Rather than just copy the link, I attempted to retrieve the attachment itself from the Nabble server.  For ‘lost’ attachments, this naturally failed, and I inserted a note indicating a ‘broken link to nabble content’.   I cases where I was able to download the attachment, I kept the copy and inserted a link to the rhodes22.net copy in place of the Nabble copy.

My lack of trust in Nabble proved well founded.  In June of 2021 the website disappeared taking all or our attachments with it.  Fortunately, I had already saved what was savable, and there are now many hundred former Nabble attachments living on rhodes22.net. (It’s hard to get a count because the files are in a directory structure by year/month/day.)

You can see what may be the last message with attachments sent through the Nabble interface here: https://www.rhodes22.net/email-archives.html?post=105390

If you click through to the ‘original archive post’, you can see that the links there point to Nabble.com, and don’t work.

The fact that I happened to write the extraction process shortly before Nabble disappeared from the face of the earth was just a bit good luck.  I should have bought a lotto ticket at the same time.

—Peter


[ Sent From rhodes22.net ]