Text encoding problems
Hi all
Mailman 2.2.0 on cPanel
In the last few days, several messages (not all!) showed problems with their text encodings.
This means, messages containing non-standard characters, like ä, ö, ü, etc. do not arrive properly at the subscriber’s side. Instead of "ä", they show "=C3=A4", for example. And at the line end, a single "=". The headers usually contain
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
which should be correct.
When I look at the "raw source" of such messages, I see a block of base64-encoded text. I can copy this text block and insert it in a base64-"decoder", such as <https://www.base64decode.org/>, I see the same effect as in the mail program.
Yesterday, I answered to such a message. And my message arrived at the subscriber’s end as base64-encoded text, it was not decoded by the recipients’ mail program, although its header contained the same indications as above (utf-8, base64).
I checked with several mail programs; all of them just showed the base64-encoded block in the mail body.
Does anybody have a solution? Did cPanel change something on its Mailman-part? Did cPanel "update" Mailman in the last few days (our provider says that such updates are automatic and he doesn’t know if there was one)?
Most of the subscribers use Mail from Apple in various versions, but there are also some with Thunderbird, Postbox, GyazMail, Outlook (Mac), etc.
Please ask if you need more info - I’ll try to answer them.
Thank you Christian
-- Christian Buser, Hohle Gasse 6, CH-5507 Mellingen (Switzerland)
You can see the latest CPANEL updates here:
https://docs.cpanel.net/changelogs/126-change-log/
On Mar 27, 2025, at 3:46 PM, Christian Buser via Mailman-Users <mailman-users@python.org> wrote:
Hi all
Mailman 2.2.0 on cPanel
In the last few days, several messages (not all!) showed problems with their text encodings.
This means, messages containing non-standard characters, like ä, ö, ü, etc. do not arrive properly at the subscriber’s side. Instead of "ä", they show "=C3=A4", for example. And at the line end, a single "=". The headers usually contain
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
which should be correct.
When I look at the "raw source" of such messages, I see a block of base64-encoded text. I can copy this text block and insert it in a base64-"decoder", such as <https://www.base64decode.org/>, I see the same effect as in the mail program.
Yesterday, I answered to such a message. And my message arrived at the subscriber’s end as base64-encoded text, it was not decoded by the recipients’ mail program, although its header contained the same indications as above (utf-8, base64).
I checked with several mail programs; all of them just showed the base64-encoded block in the mail body.
Does anybody have a solution? Did cPanel change something on its Mailman-part? Did cPanel "update" Mailman in the last few days (our provider says that such updates are automatic and he doesn’t know if there was one)?
Most of the subscribers use Mail from Apple in various versions, but there are also some with Thunderbird, Postbox, GyazMail, Outlook (Mac), etc.
Please ask if you need more info - I’ll try to answer them.
Thank you Christian
-- Christian Buser, Hohle Gasse 6, CH-5507 Mellingen (Switzerland)
Mailman-Users mailing list -- mailman-users@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to mailman-users-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.python.org/ Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/ https://mail.python.org/archives/list/mailman-users@python.org/ Member address: jerry.barnabee@gmail.com
On 2025-03-27 at 16:46:38 UTC-0400 (Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:46:38 +0100) Christian Buser via Mailman-Users <luscheina@yahoo.de> is rumored to have said:
Hi all
Mailman 2.2.0 on cPanel
There is no version 2.2.* of the public version of Mailman.
You issue needs to be taken up with cPanel. They've forked Mailman 2 in order to support Python 3.x, a task that the core maintainers of Mailman 2 deemed to be a waste of effort many years ago.
The main problem area in porting Python 2.x software to Python 3.x is text encoding. It is a sure bet that your problem is caused by cPanel's private additions to the version of Mailman 2 that the rest of the world uses.
-- Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com or billcole@apache.org (AKA @grumpybozo@toad.social and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses) Not Currently Available For Hire
participants (4)
-
Bill Cole -
Christian Buser -
Jerry Barnabee -
Stephen J. Turnbull