[Mailman-Developers] Header & Footer for non-ASCII messages

[Ben Gertzfield]

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> We have run into a problem which is probably not uncommon for
> international mailing lists: whenever a message is sent that does
> not have US-ASCII as content type, header and footer are attached
> to this message via additional mime parts.
>
> This doesn't really look nice in the mail applications. 


I've done a lot of looking in to this, and "the mail applications" that 
you mention are pretty much just Outlook, which is pretty broken with 
inline attachments.  Just about every other mail reader will inline the 
header/footer MIME parts, but Outlook shows them as separate attachments 
for no good reason.

Mailman does everything it can do to hint to the MUA to keep the header 
and footer MIME parts inline with the body, but Outlook just ignores this.

> Wouldn't it be wise to decode the message payload and prepend/
> append the header and footer properly encoded to the payload
> instead ? 


This just doesn't work.  We have to assume the header and footer are in 
the same charset as the language of the mailing list (by default, us-ascii).

If a message posted is in a language that doesn't match the language of 
the mailing list (say, UTF-8), and the header and footer of the list are 
ISO-8859-1, you can't just "decode" them both and concatenate them, as 
this will make a message with two unrelated character sets combined.

If you can come up with any hack to make Outlook include MIME 
attachments inline, it would be appreciated.  That's really all we need, 
because then we'll have the best of all worlds.

Ben