[Mailman-Developers] Mailman CVS sends out Japanese template mails in EUC-JP

[Ben Gertzfield]

Right now, Mailman 2.1 and Japanese are not working together terribly
well.

The web pages are fully internationalized, which works great.  But
there's a big problem with sending template mails out; they're stored
in EUC-JP, when Japanese mail *MUST* be formatted in ISO-2022-JP (JIS).

Kikuchi-san has developed some Handler modules to solve this problem,
but I cannot get them to work with the latest Mailman CVS.  His solution
is to add a ja_To_EUC_JP module at the beginning of the handler pipeline,
then use a ja_SMTPDirect module to convert to ISO-2022-JP at the end of
the pipeline, instead of SMTPDirect.

However, with the latest Mailman CVS, even following the instructions
at http://mm.tkikuchi.net/mailman-2.1alpha.ja/README.ja (both English
and Japanese are in there), and doing the following, welcome and
administration mails in Japanese are sent verbatim in EUC-JP, which of
course is not readable in any mail reader.

1) Install kconv.py from http://hito.eccosys.com/~mak/kconv/index_jp.html
   (python setup.py; cp -a kconv /usr/local/lib/python2.0/site-packages/)

2) Copy ja_SMTPDirect.py, ja_To_EUC_JP.py, and ja_To_ISO_2022_JP.py
   into Mailman/Handlers

3) Set DEFAULT_SERVER_LANGUAGE to 'ja', add ja_To_EUC_JP.py to the
   beginning of the pipeline, and set DELIVERY_MODULE to ja_SMTPDirect.
   (I tried both via mm_cfg.py and by making them the default in 
   Defaults.py.in, then configuring and making fresh).

I'm not getting any errors in the logs, but mail is not converted to
ISO-2022-JP with this method -- in fact, the Content-Type: text/plain;
encoding=iso-2022-jp header that ja_To_ISO-2022-JP.py is supposed to
add is not even added.

It seems like even this is a really roundabout way to get Japanese to
work in Mailman.  Without converting the emails to ISO-2022-JP,
Mailman might as well not have any Japanese support at all; it's
misleading to have the web pages support Japanese and have the welcome
mails translated, but then sending them out in an 8-bit encoding that
may wreck people's mail servers or crash their mail clients.

Please let me know if there's anything I've missed.  I would really
like to get Japanese support working in mainstream Mailman 2.1.

Ben

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