[Mailman-Developers] CTE "base64" due to UTF-8?

[Michael Heydekamp]

Hi,

we are encountering the following "problem" with Mailman 2.1.3:

When a subscriber sends a message to one of our lists with an UTF-8
encoded body and CTE "8bit", Mailman obviously recodes the body from
"8bit" to "base64" before distributing the mail to the subscribers of
the respective list.

Although this is perfectly legal it does not really make sense and also
creates sometimes hassles for users with MUAs which have difficulties
with base64 encoded bodies.  A qp-encoding would IMO be more appropriate
for text/plain bodies, but I would prefer if Mailman would not recode
the body at all.

Three strange things in this context:

1. In the Pipermail archive, the message appears in its original "8bit"
   format.

2. We are using the mail<=>news facility of Mailman, and the newsgroup
   users are also receiving the message in the original "8bit" format.

3. We have one (non-public) admin mailing list where Mailman does *not*
   recode the body.  This particular list is also *not* gated to a
   newsgroup (and this is the only difference to all of the other lists
   we are currently aware of).

Any idea or suggestion what might be the reason for the recoding and how
we could avoid it?


        Michael