[Mailman-Developers] Missing footers with latest CVS

[Ben Gertzfield]

>>>>> "Tokio" == Tokio Kikuchi <tkikuchi@is.kochi-u.ac.jp> writes:

    Dan> Well, so, one of them has no charset expressed at all that I
    Dan> can see.

    Ben> That means their charset is us-ascii.

    Tokio> Well, people around in Japan still use older MUAs and don't
    Tokio> add charset for Japanese messages.

    Tokio> So, the meaning of no charset should depend on the
    Tokio> mm_cfg.DEFAULT_SERVER_LANGUAGE, I suppose.

This would violate RFC 1522:

"5.2. Content-Type Defaults

Default RFC 822 messages without a MIME Content-Type header are taken
by this protocol to be plain text in the US-ASCII character set, which
can be explicitly specified as:

Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii"

Are we sure we really want to do that?

    Dan> Not really, if appropriate workaround is "ignore the incoming
    Dan> charset and add this footer unconditionally please".

    Ben> But this is the worst thing you can do.  What happens when I
    Ben> post a message in UTF-8 and then a Japanese ISO-2022-JP
    Ben> footer gets tacked on?  Not good.

    Tokio> That's why you need to 'normalize' the charsets of incoming
    Tokio> mail (into Unicode).

That would work in the best of all possible worlds (i.e. NOT the real
world :) but I think there is still information lost when converting
some charsets into Unicode, like Big5 and EUC-TW.  Also, who knows if
we would corrupt PGP signatures by doing something like this?

I would like to have Mailman move to this model eventually, when
all mail readers support UTF-8 natively.

Ben

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