[Mailman-i18n] charset anoyance

[Martin v. Löwis]

Santiago Garcia Mantinan <mailman-i18n at manty.net> writes:

> First I see that for the Spanish language we are having iso-8859-1 instead
> of iso-8859-15 which would allow us to use the euro symbol and all that.

That should not cause any annoyance, as none of the mailman messages
ever uses a currency symbol. Users can happily sent email messages in
any encoding they like.

> Suppose I have a list which default language is using charset iso-8859-1,
> then somebody comes and posts in iso-8859-15 and you get it all in three
> mime parts, one for the header, in iso-8859-1, one for the body in
> iso-8859-15 and then the footer in iso-8859-1 again. This seems quite
> anoying, at least when yo look at it. 

Why is this annoying? All three parts are plain text, so a capable
mail reader should be able to render it all in a single message.

> I was wondering if there is, or if it would make sense to add,
> something so that this doesn't happen.

Whether it would make sense, I don't know, but it would be
possible. Of course, some people actually prefer to have the messages
in three parts, since it allows users to retrieve the original body of
the message.

If you want to add it, please look at Mailman/Handlers/Decorate.py.
The test

    if not msg.is_multipart() and msgtype == 'text/plain' and \
           msg.get('content-transfer-encoding', '').lower() <> 'base64' and \
           (lcset == 'us-ascii' or mcset == lcset):

is the one that allows direct concatenation of the header. You could
extend this to recode the header into the message charset.

> Also I see something that is for sure doable, and it is that when the same
> person writes with some mailers like mutt and doesn't use any 8 bits
> character, then the mailer would encode the text as us-ascii, which if I'm
> not wrong, should mix ok with iso-8859-1, I mean that the hole message could
> come as one using iso-8859-1, and that is not done right now.

If the mailer already choses us-ascii as the body encoding, then
mailman will do exactly that. However, it seems you assume a case
where the body is in iso-8859-15, yet uses only ASCII characters.

I don't think mailman should recode the body even in that
case. Instead, recoding the headers to the message's encoding should
work fine, again.

Regards,
Martin