[Mailman-Users] Formatting the Subject-field in other languages

[Brad Knowles]

At 11:12 AM +0200 2005-11-01, Rene Hertell wrote:

>  I've got the impression that Mailman cleans multiple Re's and Fw's from
>  the subject-line (and not the email-client), but now when a user sends
>  an message with an email-client that uses other abbreviations as the
>  English ones, they just stick there. This is an example of a subject
>  sent in a Finnish mailing-list:
>
>  [HUV] VS:  VS:  VS:  VS:  VS:  VS:  VS:  VS:  Järvenpää
>
>  So, Here you see that as normal Re: is instead VS:

	The RFCs clearly specify that you *cannot* use any subject prefix 
tag for this purpose, other than "Re:" -- even "Fw:" and "Fwd:" are 
not allowed.  So, any mail client that does that is in clear 
violation of the standard.

	That said, there are obviously such programs.

>  I tried also to dig in the Mailman-code, but as python is not so
>  familiar to me, I could not figure out in what place this "Subject-line"
>  clean-up is situated.

	It's funny, I'm looking through the code on Mailman 2.1.5, and 
I'm not finding things where I would expect.  From what I can tell, 
it appears that subject line cleanup for this prefix is actually done 
in several different places.

	It's done once in HyperArch.py (which is a part of the built-in 
Mailman archiver), once in CommandRunner.py (which is the part of the 
system that handles commands to the mailing list being sent via 
e-mail), and maybe some other places as well.

	Logically, you'd think that this would be done once on message 
input, and then never need to be done again.  But that doesn't seem 
to be the case here.


	Maybe someone with a deeper understanding of the code can provide 
some insight.


	Of course, do keep in mind that if you make a local change to 
your Mailman code to provide subject line stripping for other 
prefixes, you will have to re-apply those changes every time you 
upgrade your Mailman system.  If you're at a shop that insists on 
using binary packages for everything, then there's nothing anyone can 
do for you.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.