Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham@dev.intechnology.co.uk> wrote on 19.07.04:
There is one serious problem with sending out 8 bit mail. [...]
I'm aware of all of these problems but that still doesn't explain ...
a) why Mailman recodes the UTF-8 body to base64 rather than qp (which would be the recommended and much better option for text/plain). I suspect that it must have to do something with UTF-8, but I still have to check what Mailman is doing with an 8bit mail in say ISO-8859-1.
b) why Mailman does not always do that (as I mentioned, we are not seeing this behaviour with our non-public admin-list).
So there must be a way (or a config setting) to prevent Mailman from recoding to base64 - if somebody could just tell me how, pleeez? :)
A case in point here is exim which does not do MIME transcoding (or body hacking in general).
We are indeed using Exim but that applies also to the admin-list. So why the heck are mails to this particular list distributed in 8bit?
For this reason a case could be made for all mail initiators, including MLMs, to encode for 7 bit transport.
Right. That's what I'm doing anyway, but this doesn't apply to all of our subscribers.
Michael