[Mailman-Developers] Patch #102268

[Dan Mick]

Erik Forsberg wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> I submitted a patch (at sourceforge) earlier today, #102268. It's basically a
> two-line-change to MailMan/Archiver/HyperArch.py in 2.0rc1 that makes
> the Content-Transfer-Encoding all lowercase. Hopefully I produced a
> working patch-file..
> 
> In my humble opinion that patch is small and uncomplicated enough to
> fit into the release version, but I'll leave that decision to the
> Cabal.
> 
> Anyway, the reason I wrote the patch was that some mails in a list I
> have didn't decode the QP the right way because the
> Content-Transfer-Encoding was QUOTED-PRINTABLE (all uppercase). The
> person writing the mails is using dtmail. So far, the patch comment is
> quite the same as this mail.
> 
> The reason I write this mail is that I actually found some text in RFC
> 1521 that supports my patch fully. Here:
> 
> ---snip---
>    The Content-Transfer-Encoding field is designed to specify an
>    invertible mapping between the "native" representation of a type of
>    data and a representation that can be readily exchanged using 7 bit
>    mail transport protocols, such as those defined by RFC 821 (SMTP).
>    This field has not been defined by any previous standard. The field's
>    value is a single token specifying the type of encoding, as
>    enumerated below.  Formally:
> 
>    encoding := "Content-Transfer-Encoding" ":" mechanism
> 
>    mechanism :=     "7bit"  ;  case-insensitive
>                   / "quoted-printable"
>                   / "base64"
>                   / "8bit"
>                   / "binary"
>                   / x-token
> 
>    These values are not case sensitive.  That is, Base64 and BASE64 and
>    bAsE64 are all equivalent.  An encoding type of 7BIT requires that
>    the body is already in a seven-bit mail-ready representation.  This
>    is the default value -- that is, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT" is
>    assumed if the Content-Transfer-Encoding header field is not
>    present.
> ---snap---
> 
> Note the the words "not case sensitive" :-).

So, that means that a header which reads QUOTED-PRINTABLE is completely
RFC-compliant, and if there's a mailreader or other utility that barfs on
it, it's that mailreader's bug, not Mailman's.

Or am I missing something?

> And guess if I was confused by the fact that the archive creates new
> files every time you run the 'arch' utility. After testing my code, I
> reloaded the message in my browser, and nothing happended. Very
> confusing until I understood that there was a new file with the
> message in it..
> 
> I guess the archiver behaves that way so search engines won't get
> confused if you remove a message or something?

No, arch is there to rebuild archives from .mbox files; it's not there to add
messages.  Hence its comment: 

	Use this command to rebuild the archives for a mailing list.