[Mailman-Users] Encoding problems

[Allan Odgaard]

On 18 Jun 2008, at 16:09, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> [...]
> The process of adding the list header and/or footer to the message
> attempts to add these to a text/plain body by coercing the body and
> the header/footer to unicode, concatenating them and then coercing
> back to the original body charset. If the last step doesn't work, it
> will try to coerce to the charset of the list's preferred language.

My list header/footer is pure ASCII. So there should never be a  
problem going back to the original body encoding.

So should I consider it a bug that setting list encoding to utf-8 will  
(in my experience) _always_ produce (base 64 encoded) utf-8 letters,  
when both header/footer and letter itself sent to list is ASCII?

Here is what I did to test: Set list encoding to utf-8 (in mm_cfg.py).  
Created a new list (called Test) and subscribed to it. Even the  
welcome letter contained:

     Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
     Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
     Subject: =?utf-8?q?Welcome_to_the_=22Test=22_mailing_list?=

Notice here the subject was sent as utf-8 even though it is pure  
ASCII, the body was likewise encoded.

I then sent one letter to this list, subject set to Test and body  
likewise. I ensured that the produced letter was sent with encoding  
set to ASCII. The letter I received as a subscriber was one giant  
block of base64 encoded text with charset set to utf-8.