Hi.

I work a bit in OSS and contribute to mimedefang and spamassassin, and myself am on about 70 mailing lists.

I notice that some of these lists that are open to outside mailings are magnets for spam.

As a consequence, the end-recipients of these lists can't "trust" mail coming from these lists, and if we filter it (and reject it), we run the risk of being auto-unsubscribed for too many delivery failures...

It's a thorny issue.

In a perfect world, all MUA's would comply with the following recommendation:

RFC 2046, last paragraph of section 4.1.2:

In general, composition software should always use the "lowest common denominator" character set possible. For example, if a body contains only US-ASCII characters, it SHOULD be marked as being in the US- ASCII character set, not ISO-8859-1, which, like all the ISO-8859 family of character sets, is a superset of US-ASCII. More generally, if a widely-used character set is a subset of another character set, and a body contains only characters in the widely-used subset, it should be labelled as being in that subset. This will increase the chances that the recipient will be able to view the resulting entity correctly.

And thereby, it would be trivial to bounce a message sent to an English-language only mailing list that wasn't encoded in USASCII or Latin1 (iso-8859-1) as the charset.

But alas they don't.

So end-users mail systems end up having to do this, which creates all sorts of backscatter to the mailing list, etc.

What if mailing list exploders did the following?

When you receive a message that has text/plain parts that aren't "charset=usascii" or "charset=latin1" attempt to transcode the parts into one of these (in that order, until success).

If the transcoding fails, reject the message.

Otherwise, substitute the rewritten parts in the forwarded message.

Yes, I know that it's not a good thing to rewrite messages... but most mailing lists do a fair amount of message munging anyway (to the point that PGP becomes useless, for instance).

What do you all think?

It doesn't have to be the default behavior... But it would definitely be handy to be an option.

Thanks,

-Philip