[Mailman-Users] Digest always in MIME

[Brad Knowles]

Matthieu HUTIN wrote:

> I've done a test by sending an email myself. I always send email as plain
> test (I hate HTMl in mails ;-) ) So it should have been "digested" as plain
> texte according to my setup. However I may be wrong as this is the first
> time i'm facing this issues. It's been working perfectly for the past 5
> years with older mailman versions (2.1.5 was the last version I used without
> problems).

You sent a text/plain, but you used iso-8859-1 as your character set, 
and you included binary characters.  That got encoded as 
quoted-printable when it was sent, and that was preserved when the 
message was transmitted back out.

Now, I'm not an expert in the workings of the underlying MIME or e-mail 
library code in Python that is used by Mailman, but I suspect that any 
non-USASCII characters in any of the input messages will force all the 
digests to be processed as MIME and not plain text.  Unfortunately, for 
a language like French, that poses a problem since there are so many 
accents you have to account for.


Now, Python is written by a very international community speaking many, 
many different languages, and to a somewhat lesser degree the same is 
true of Mailman.  So, we are very sensitive to language and character 
set problems and we do everything we can to try to avoid causing 
problems for anyone else.  But that means we *don't* take a "just send 
eight" approach to transmitting messages, and instead we actually try to 
"Do The Right Thing".  Unfortunately, sometimes not everyone agrees on 
what that "Right Thing" is.


Unfortunately, we really don't have all the information here that we 
need.  We do see that the outgoing message gets wrapped up in a 
multipart/mixed, but we don't see what might have caused that to happen.

I will also add that qmail is not one of my favourite MTAs, because I've 
seen more than a few problems caused by it (and I'm not very popular 
amongst the qmail communities).  But I'm also aware that plenty of sites 
out there are using qmail on a daily basis without any problems, so I 
won't even talk about pointing the finger that direction until we've 
eliminated all other likely possibilities.


If you want to send me a complete, unredacted copy of the message in 
question (with all headers intact), I'll be glad to take a look at it 
for you and see if I can spot anything obvious.  Alternatively, if you 
like I can subscribe to your "liste" and we can try out some things that 
way.  All I ask is that you keep in mind that I don't speak or read 
French, despite of the fact that I lived in Belgium for nearly eight 
years and my wife and I moved back to the US just a couple years ago.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>