[Mailman-Developers] Missing footers with latest CVS

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Mick <dmick@utopia.West.Sun.COM> writes:

    Dan> Why a garbage message?  Why not just a (potentially) garbage
    Dan> footer?

Well, if it garbles HTML, it's going to hose our web interface.  This
is very possible with the Asian double-byte 7-bit encodings which are
rife with random usage of octets like <, ", etc.

Also, some MUAs (think Emacs RMail, but also Outhouse Abcess)
autodetect the encoding of the message buffer, usually based on the
first 3000-4000 characters.  Very long messages would be OK, but
typical messages would have the confusing footer within that space.  I
really can't predict what Abcess would do with that (although it's
quite good at generating that kind of stuff itself, Microsoft Unicode
BOM followed by ASCII HTML markup intermixed with Unicode P?CDATA, for
one egregious example of a beta version ;-).

Recently things have gotten better but when I first got to Japan I got
to the point where I could read my boss's name and the name of the
department in both base64 and raw bytes.  Alphanumerics are easy; the
double byte versions are #1, #2, ..., #A, .... ;-)  So bogus encodings
are no joke on this side of the big blue puddle.

For more information, Jukka Korpela's page is quite good, there must
be an intro or seven there, and you don't even need to read Finnish!

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

-- 
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