[Mailman-Developers] Patch #102268

[Erik Forsberg]

Hi!

I submitted a patch (at sourceforge) earlier today, #102268. It's basically a
two-line-change to MailMan/Archiver/HyperArch.py in 2.0rc1 that makes
the Content-Transfer-Encoding all lowercase. Hopefully I produced a
working patch-file.. 

In my humble opinion that patch is small and uncomplicated enough to
fit into the release version, but I'll leave that decision to the
Cabal.

Anyway, the reason I wrote the patch was that some mails in a list I
have didn't decode the QP the right way because the
Content-Transfer-Encoding was QUOTED-PRINTABLE (all uppercase). The
person writing the mails is using dtmail. So far, the patch comment is
quite the same as this mail.

The reason I write this mail is that I actually found some text in RFC
1521 that supports my patch fully. Here:

---snip---
   The Content-Transfer-Encoding field is designed to specify an
   invertible mapping between the "native" representation of a type of
   data and a representation that can be readily exchanged using 7 bit
   mail transport protocols, such as those defined by RFC 821 (SMTP).
   This field has not been defined by any previous standard. The field's
   value is a single token specifying the type of encoding, as
   enumerated below.  Formally:

   encoding := "Content-Transfer-Encoding" ":" mechanism

   mechanism :=     "7bit"  ;  case-insensitive
                  / "quoted-printable"
                  / "base64"
                  / "8bit"
                  / "binary"
                  / x-token

   These values are not case sensitive.  That is, Base64 and BASE64 and
   bAsE64 are all equivalent.  An encoding type of 7BIT requires that
   the body is already in a seven-bit mail-ready representation.  This
   is the default value -- that is, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT" is
   assumed if the Content-Transfer-Encoding header field is not
   present.
---snap---

Note the the words "not case sensitive" :-).

And guess if I was confused by the fact that the archive creates new
files every time you run the 'arch' utility. After testing my code, I
reloaded the message in my browser, and nothing happended. Very
confusing until I understood that there was a new file with the
message in it..

I guess the archiver behaves that way so search engines won't get
confused if you remove a message or something?

\EF
-- 
Erik Forsberg                 http://www.lysator.liu.se/~forsberg/
PGP fingerprint = 37 1B D7 9E 97 8C EF 39  0E DE 08 E8 99 0C 5E A9