[Mailman-Users] mailman 2.1.5 subject line problem

[Mark Sapiro]

Rimgaudas Laucius wrote:
>
>i installed mailman 2.1.5 on Linux (rh9).
>The problem is with letters where are used national characters (8 bit
>[#128..#255] from baltic cp Windows 1257 or ISOxxxx-13) in subject line.
>Mailman does not pass such letters (discards them without any message).
>Earlier version (2.0.14) had not such problem.
>

I understand your problem, but the real problem is with your MUA that
creates a message with characters outside the [#1..#127] range in the
subject.

RFC2822 section 2.2 says in part:

  Header fields are lines composed of a field name, followed by a colon
  (":"), followed by a field body, and terminated by CRLF.  A field
  name MUST be composed of printable US-ASCII characters (i.e.,
  characters that have values between 33 and 126, inclusive), except
  colon.

RFC822 uses different language but also restricts the characters to the
printable US-ASCII range.

RFC2047 provides a method for encoding characters outside this range
into message headers using either base64 or quoted-printable encoding.
This gives headers that look for example like:

  Subject: =?iso-8859-13?q?Subject= with= =c0= Baltic= character?=

Of course, there are major problems because not all MUAs create headers
in this way  and not all MUAs understand them, but this isn't really a
Mailman issue.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan