[Mailman-Users] Encoding problems

[Mark Sapiro]

Allan Odgaard wrote:

>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.


Actually, I misspoke above. The preferred encoding is that of the
list's preferred language. The incoming message encoding is the
fallback.


>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?


You may consider it a bug if you wish. It is intentional (but still
perhaps wrong) that the message is coerced to the character set of the
list's preferred language when msg_header and/or msg_footer are added.

The base64 encoding for a utf-8 message is a separate issue and is done
by the Python email library.


>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?=


This is a 'virgin' message from Mailman which will always be in the
charset of the list's or user's preferred language, so no surprise
here.

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