[Mailman-i18n] [SCREENSHOT] Mailman sends i18n MIME emails in all languages!

[Ben Gertzfield]

I've been working for the past few months on getting proper support in
Mailman and the Python email module for i18n mails.

Barry and I have gotten a lot of work done, and we now have a working
Mailman and email module which sends out emails correctly in *all* our
supported languages: Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional),
Czech, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, and Norwegian!

Here's a screenshot of the successful work:

http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/mailman/mailman_i18n.png

(or http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/mailman/mailman_i18n.jpg for
differently-abled browsers).

Thanks to all the great translators who have made this possible!  Your
work is never appreciated enough. :)

This support includes:

  * Header encoding with quoted-printable for European languages:

Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?Votre_nouvelle_liste_de_diffusion=3A_test-fr?=

  * Header encoding with base64, with *correct* splitting of long
    lines on character boundaries to avoid splitting in between two
    bytes of a multibyte character:

Subject: =?iso-2022-jp?b?GyRCJCIkSiQ/JE4/NyQ3JCQlYSE8JWolcyUwGyhC?=
 =?iso-2022-jp?b?GyRCJWolOSVIGyhCOiBjZ2ktdGVzdA==?=

  * Body encoding with quoted-printable for European languages,
    and base64 for Chinese or unknown languages

  * Optional conversion from gettext catalog character set to email
    character set (for EUC-JP to iso-2022-jp for Japanese emails)

  * General support for future character sets.  Even multibyte
    character sets are supported; as long as a Unicode codec for
    Python exists that will convert the character set to/from
    Unicode, it will be supported

  * All command-line tools and web interfaces in Mailman that generate
    email have been modified to use the new, simple i18n-aware
    programming interface.

This support does not yet fix:

  * Multilingual archives.  Pipermail seriously needs help.

  * Admin interface for Japanese: mails are in iso-2022-jp, but
    the interface is EUC-JP!  Need to convert.

  * Multilingual bounce messages.  Working on that soon.

There are a few issues with some of the current translations I will
bring up in my next message, but thanks to everyone for making this
possible!  Hopefully, as Barry likes to say, Mailman truly will rule
the i18n world soon!

This work is currently in the mimelib (email) CVS tree, at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mimelib

The Mailman patch has not yet been integrated, but for curious folks,
please check out:

http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/mailman/uber-i18n.patch

If you have an up-to-date CVS email module installed, this patch will
make Mailman send out correctly MIME encoded emails.  Any feedback is
appreciated.

Ben

-- 
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"More testicles means more iron."
Debian GNU/Linux maintainer of Gimp and Nethack -- http://www.debian.org/