[Mailman-Developers] Header & Footer for non-ASCII messages

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Ben Gertzfield wrote:
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> 
>> We have run into a problem which is probably not uncommon for
>> international mailing lists: whenever a message is sent that does
>> not have US-ASCII as content type, header and footer are attached
>> to this message via additional mime parts.
>>
>> This doesn't really look nice in the mail applications. 
> 
> I've done a lot of looking in to this, and "the mail applications" that 
> you mention are pretty much just Outlook, which is pretty broken with 
> inline attachments.  Just about every other mail reader will inline the 
> header/footer MIME parts, but Outlook shows them as separate attachments 
> for no good reason.

Hmm, I'm using Mozilla's mail app and it doesn't look right in there
either.

> Mailman does everything it can do to hint to the MUA to keep the header 
> and footer MIME parts inline with the body, but Outlook just ignores this.
> 
>> Wouldn't it be wise to decode the message payload and prepend/
>> append the header and footer properly encoded to the payload
>> instead ? 
> 
> This just doesn't work.  We have to assume the header and footer are in 
> the same charset as the language of the mailing list (by default, 
> us-ascii).

Right.

> If a message posted is in a language that doesn't match the language of 
> the mailing list (say, UTF-8), and the header and footer of the list are 
> ISO-8859-1, you can't just "decode" them both and concatenate them, as 
> this will make a message with two unrelated character sets combined.

Uhm, you can decode both into Unicode, paste them together and then
encode the result again in either the mailing lists default charset
or UTF-8.

> If you can come up with any hack to make Outlook include MIME 
> attachments inline, it would be appreciated.  That's really all we need, 
> because then we'll have the best of all worlds.

Not really -- inline MIME parts simply don't look right for things
like headers and footers. They are fine for images and the like,
but headers and footers really belong right into the main message
text.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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