[Mailman-Developers] Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding headers

Michael Sobolev mss@transas.com
Thu, 27 Jul 2000 13:48:06 +0400


Gentlemen,

As far as I see, this question arised several time, but no answer was given.

Here is the problem.  I tried to create few mailing lists for my company.
Our
native language is Russian, which means that Content-Type header usually has
something like like as its value:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r

And, as our users use different MUA, Content-Transfer-Encoding may well be
different from 8bit, and it's usually equal to base64 or quoted-printable.

The problem is two folded.  The mailing list engine just appends footer
maillist administrator creates and this usually results in garbage, as

    ---
    mailing list blah...

usually is meaningless if interpreted according to Content-Transfer-Encoding
header if the latter is equal to base64 or quoted-printable.

The second important issue is maillist archives. Neither `charset' value
from
Content-Type header nor Conten-Transfer-Encoding header are used while
creating
html pages for messages.  Which makes the archives completely unusable.

I found a hack for the first problem (I just make no footer for the mailing
lists) and may avoid the second problem by using an external archiver.  But
this is not a solution, as it looks like mailman (2.0 beta4 at the moment)
cannot be used in environments where non iso-8859-1 or us-ascii charset are
used...

I'd appreciate any comments.

Thanks,

--
Misha