[Mailman-Developers] ASCII Prefixes

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Here's a tricky issue, one with a high rabbit hole probability (which
I'd like to avoid if possible ;).

Say you've got a mailing list that accepts both French and English,
with French as the default language.  The default charset for French
is iso-8859-1 and for English us-ascii.  Now say you want to add a
prefix to your list, say "[MyList]", and you're users like to send
messages to the list with funny <wink> non-ascii characters in
iso-8859-1.

What Mailman 2.1 cvs will do now is encode the prefix using the
charset for the list's default language.  So you'd likely end up with
a Subject: header like

    Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?[MyList]_?= =?iso-8859-1?hello_world?=

or some such.  Encoding the prefix can be considered ugly, but
unfortunately we don't really have a way to specify a charset for the
subject prefix (or footers, or other added text) apart from the
default language's charset.  So this is /almost/ the best we can do,
even though it's kind of ugly.

OTOH, we could use a simple heuristic to try to keep the prefix
unencoded in the common case: if the prefix contains only ascii
characters, we could choose to leave it in the default us-ascii (or
really the None) encoding.  If it contains non-ascii characters, we'd
have no choice but to encode it.

I really don't want to go down the path of providing a gui for
different prefixes for each supported language.  Eventually, maybe
that's what we need to do, but I'd like to avoid that for MM2.1.  I
think this approach should be good enough, but I'd like to hear
comments, especially from Asian language users.

-Barry