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

[Bjørn Vermo]

On 18 Jul 2004 15:55:00 +0200, Michael Heydekamp <my at freexp.de> wrote:

> 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.
>
...

Yes, I find it quite annoying when a listserver performs that type of  
recoding. I find it even worse when it garbles the content because it does  
not sunderstand the encoding. This is mainly a problem with people who  
reply to digests.

I would prefer to have a configuration option where I could set the  
outgoing encoding to utf-8 with 8bit cte. Others may want to cater to  
special local needs. In any case, the digester needs to understand more  
about encoding. It cannot just pass everything through as now, since it is  
converting headers to body text. It needs to understand enough about  
MIME-headers to get subjects and names converted into utf-8, and it needs  
to understand Punycode to convert international domain names.

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