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[CC'ing François as the recode guru -BAW] I think I finally, mostly, understand this issue and have fixes in place for it. To test it I added three users to a list, one with a pure ascii name, one with an iso-8859-1 name and one with Tokio Kikuchi's name. :) I can now see the names both in the admin page, the options page, and properly encoded in email. Everything's checked in so I'd love to get some feedback. Basically, when encoding for html, I want to end up with a byte string that is encoded in the charset of the web page, with any funny characters htmlref'd. When encoding for email, I want to end up with a Unicode string that the Header class can munch on to produce an RFC 2047 encoding. I have one nit that I'm not sure how to address though. I use VM in a MULE-ified XEmacs to read my mail and it has pretty good header decoding routines. If the charset is provided, it'll show me the real characters in a presentation buffer. However, it needs help for utf-8. Here's an example of a To header sent to my address with TK's Unicode name as the full name. Note that I've set this member's language to English, so Mailman doesn't know what character set the full name is in, but hey, it's stored internally as Unicode. To: =?utf-8?b?6I+K5Zyw5pmC5aSr?= <barry@wooz.org> I can take the characters 6I+K5Zyw5pmC5aSr, stick them in a file, and see the Japanese characters in a shell buffer when I execute the following command: % recode utf-8/b64..iso-2022-jp < /tmp/tk.txt However VM doesn't show me the Japanese characters for this name because it doesn't have internal support for utf-8 decoding. However it can call out to recode (or iconv) after doing the base64 conversion internall, if I know the target charset and the command line. But I /don't/ know the target charset any more than Mailman does. Just about anything can be utf-8 encoded right? Maybe there's no way to hook it up with VM (vm-mime-charset-converter-alist for the Emacsheads in the audience), or maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about. :) Since I don't know the target character set, is there really anything I can do? Or am I not encoding the full name as well as I can? If anybody has any clues to help me get VM to display the characters would be greatly appreciated. -Barry