[Mailman-Users] UTF-8 question

[Eva Isaksson]

Recently, I was asked to set our mailman installation to utf-8.
Our server is running the debian 2.1.9 mailman package.
I did this, and it "works" -- but I have a question anyway.

I started with the current settings: default language Finnish, 
charset iso-8859-1. 

The changes made for utf-8 included:
- changing the template files and the Finnish translation file
into utf-8 with iconv.
- fixing the mm_cfg.py by making DEFAULT_CHARSET = 'UTF-8'
and copying the relevant litany of LC_DESCRIPTIONS from
Defaults.py into mm_cfg.py and setting Finnish into utf-8.

Now, the problem that keeps puzzling me:

1. Before the change, mails with charset=iso-8859-1 and
charset=utf-8 were being distributed with the charset
untouched. I figured out as this is how it should be - right?

2. As our server hosts a lot of lists (almost 400 of them)
I decided to try utf-8 out on a smaller scale first, on an 
Ubuntu server, running only a couple of lists with its standard 
mailman package, version 2.1.5. The utf-8 change was a success. 
The webpages and archive were all okay, and the charset of 
mails was untouched too.

3. As things looked promising, I decided to proceed with our
real list server. The result: 
Web pages, archive, all okay, now in utf-8.
Mails... all of them in utf-8. And I mean ALL mails.

My question: was this to be expected? Is everything meant
to be in utf-8 from now on, including the forcing of
charset=utf-8 into all list mail headers? And why didn't this 
happen neither with the iso-8859-1 settings, nor with the
Ubuntu server?


- Eva
-- 
 Eva Isaksson * eva at vihreat.fi * Eva.Isaksson at Helsinki.Fi
 http://www.helsinki.fi/~eisaksso/