Re: [Mailman-Users] Encoding problems

Allan Odgaard wrote:

Some of my subscribers have accents and similar in their name and I
had to do the following post install to have Mailman properly work
with these:

## CLI

In order to get list_members -f «list» to properly output non-ASCII
user names I had to put the following:

import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

Into /etc/python2.5/sitecustomize.py. This is despite proper setup
of LC_CTYPE on the system. Seems to me Mailman should use the
encoding of the current locale, not this site-wide Python default
encoding (settable by root only).

I am aware of this issue, but I think the place to fix it is Python, not Mailman.

## Web

For the web page forms to accept non-ASCII I had to put this:

add_language('en', 'English', 'utf-8')

Into /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py. I think utf-8 should be the default
because even on an English list, you can use non-ASCII punctuation,
glyphs, and many European subscribers will have non-ASCII in their
names.

The web UI is scheduled for overhaul. This will probably be addressed.

## Mailing List

The mailing list letters are correct _except_ that the body now
contains this:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

And yes, each letter sent to the list is converted into base64.

Again, this is the Python email library. If you prefer quoted-printable, set the language's charset to iso-8859-1.

I tried disabling the above utf-8 changes, but it did not seem to fix
it. But it might be that the list language (containing utf-8) was
copied at list creation time, so I will effectively have to recreate
the list (or write Python code) to change this?

The list's preferred language was set at list create time and can be changed at any time thereafter, but nothing about that language's charset is in the list config.

Did you restart Mailman after removing

 add_language('en', 'English', 'utf-8')

from mm_cfg.py? If so, and you're still getting utf-8 encoded list mail, the incoming posts are probably utf-8 encoded.

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