[Mailman-Users] Mailman Digest Content-Transfer-Encoding

[Mark Sapiro]

Andrew Miller wrote:

>We run Mailman 2.1.5 on Mac OS X 10.4.11 Server. Postfix 2.1.5 is the  
>SMTP server. A number of our subscribers who are sent digests are not  
>able to receive them. The digest messages are bouncing with the error  
>message:
>
>Action: failed
>Status: 5.6.1
>Diagnostic-Code: smtp;554 5.6.1 Body type not supported by Remote Host
>
>Many of these digests are sent with the header Content-Transfer- 
>Encoding: 8bit, and I am wondering if this is what is causing some of  
>our subscribers to not receive these messages.


It could be, but as far as I know, if the remote MTA doesn't indicate
an ability to accept 8bit, Postfix should convert the body to
quoted-printable.


>Has anyone else here experienced this problem, and is there a way to  
>force Mailman to generate digests using the quoted-printable encoding  
>instead? Or possibly, is there a way to get Postfix to translate to  
>quoted-printable? We have recently migrated to Mailman from a  
>different list serve program, and never had this problem with digests  
>with the older list serve.


If in fact it is the Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit that is the
problem, it seems strange that only digests are affected. The
Content-Transfer-Encoding: is determined by by the Python email
library based on the character set and content of the message.

For a normal, English language digest, the character set is us-ascii in
which case the Content-Transfer-Encoding: will be 8bit or 7bit
depending on whether or not the message actually contains 8bit codes.

You can force QP encoding by forcing the message to be iso-8859-1
rather than us-ascii. You can do this by putting

add_language('en', 'English (USA)', 'iso-8859-1')

in mm_cfg.py.

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