[Mailman-Users] Corrupt Chinese Emails from Subscribe

[Mark Sapiro]

On 11/11/2014 08:06 PM, Greg Sims wrote:
> 
> We created a chinese-devotion mailman list.  The list was created with
> English as the default language and "en" as the only supported language.
> We then created three files in the "en/" directory associated with the
> list: verify.txt, unsub.txt and subscribeack.txt.  These files contain a
> mixture of Chinese and English characters including mailman substitution
> variables.


There is a potential issue in that Mailman's default character set for
English is US-ASCII. Mailman may be sending these messages  with
'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii' even though they contain
utf-8 encoded characters.

Possibly, some MUAs will recognize the utf-8 encoding and render it as
you intend while others do not.

You need to examine the Content-Type: header of the received message to
see if the above is correct. If so, the solution is to change the
default character set for English to utf-8. You do this by putting the line

add_language('en', 'English (USA)', 'utf-8', 'ltr')

The only downside to doing this in general is that Python's email
package base64 encodes charset=utf-8 message parts. This makes them more
difficult to read is raw messages, but is not really a problem.

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