[Mailman-Users] A scrubber issue

[Todd Zullinger]

Mark Sapiro wrote:
> So there are mainstream MUAs that don't specify the charset of a
> text/plain attachment because they don't know what it is. Given
> this, Mailman does the safe thing which is to save the contents of
> the part as is rather than risking mangling it by trying to coerce
> it to us-ascii.

Okay, thanks for the plentiful reasons to not make the assumption of
us-ascii.

>>I plan on contacting the Gnus folks and mentioning that adding a
>>content-type header would help to avoid any confusion, but I want to
>>be prepared to respond half-intelligently if someone points out that
>>the RFC says without one it should be assumed as text/plain and
>>us-ascii.
> 
> 
> What they really need to do is, as Tokio suggests, fix their
> mm_cfg.py setting for PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL. It appears that what they
> have is

Yep, I know that the gnupg.org lists have some configuration problems
that need fixed.  In the above I mean that I plan to contact the folks
who author Werner's MUA, Gnus (a mail client inside of Emacs -- and
here I thought Emacs was just an OS ;).  Sorry for not making that
clearer, I realize that mixing a discussion of GnuPG and Gnus can get
messy.

In addition to changes to the gnupg.org config, it could be helpful if
Gnus added content-type headers, as lacking them is what caused
Mailman to totally skip the first part in Werner's message.  I'll wait
to see what you and Tokio come up with to fix that within Mailman, but
it shouldn't hurt to mention it to the Gnus authors, as I know there
are many, many email parsers out there that are much less thoughtfully
designed than Mailman. :)

> For other ill effects of the current setting, see the archives link on
> the page at <http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users>

Yeah, I've been there and have offered to help out if I can to fix
those types of issues.  I first wanted to square away any potential
Mailman bugs so that I could add "apply the patch referenced in this
thread on mailman-users" in addition to suggesting some config
changes.

Werner may not wish to wipe and regenerate the archives, as he
mentioned that he noticed it would break all existing links into the
archives.

That is a hard choice to make - break any external links to your
archives or fix the broken internal ones by wiping and recreating
them.  I don't doubt that it'll get solved at some point though, after
reading the thread here a week or so ago.

> For an example of how this is supposed to work, see what
> scrubber/pipermail does with your PGP signature at
> <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2006-December/054956.html>

Indeed.  You helped track down and fix a small bug in the handling of
pgp/mime messages that included attachments not long ago.  As usual,
your patient and persistent help is very much appreciated!

-- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.
    -- Mark Twain

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