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

[Michael Heydekamp]

Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk> wrote on 19.07.04:

> There is one serious problem with sending out 8 bit mail. [...]

I'm aware of all of these problems but that still doesn't explain ...

a) why Mailman recodes the UTF-8 body to base64 rather than qp (which
   would be the recommended and much better option for text/plain). I
   suspect that it must have to do something with UTF-8, but I still
   have to check what Mailman is doing with an 8bit mail in say
   ISO-8859-1.

b) why Mailman does not always do that (as I mentioned, we are not
   seeing this behaviour with our non-public admin-list).

So there must be a way (or a config setting) to prevent Mailman from
recoding to base64 - if somebody could just tell me how, pleeez? :)

> A case in point here is exim which does not do MIME transcoding (or
> body hacking in general).

We are indeed using Exim but that applies also to the admin-list.  So
why the heck are mails to this particular list distributed in 8bit?

> For this reason a case could be made for all mail initiators,
> including MLMs, to encode for 7 bit transport.

Right.  That's what I'm doing anyway, but this doesn't apply to all of
our subscribers.


        Michael