[Mailman-Users] Base64 encoding?

[Mark Sapiro]

Jim Garrison wrote:

>Mark Sapiro wrote:
>> Jim Garrison wrote:
>> 
>>> Does Mailman ever take a message that it received in plain
>>> text form and re-encode it in base64 (leaving the mime type
>>> as text/plain)?
>> 
>> 
>> Yes. (It's actually the underlying Python email library that does it.)
>> On English language lists, it happens most commonly with messages
>> whose character set is utf-8.
>
>Is there a way to disable this?


Don't add msg_header or msg_footer to the message. Then Mailman won't
modify the text/plain body part and the Python email library won't
recode it.


>What's the reason for base64
>encoding UTF8? Is it trying to avoid using the high bit of
>each message byte?


Yes, it is avoiding creating messages containg characters with the high
order bit set because not all MTAs support the 8BITMIME SMTP service
extension.

The Python email library has a defined message body encoding for every
character set it understands. For utf-8 this is base64.

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