[Mailman-Developers] CTE "base64" due to UTF-8?

[Michael Heydekamp]

Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> wrote on 19.07.04:

> At 6:14 PM +0200 2004-07-19, Michael Heydekamp wrote:

>>>  However, I'm still not convinced that it's Mailman which is doing
>>>  the translation, as opposed to your MTA.

>>  Hmm, to my best knowledge Exim is known to not mangle the body at
>>  all.

>     In which case, Exim could be a potential reason that might cause
>     unknowing recipients to get unceremoniously tossed off the list.

Which is not really clear to me how that could happen (and which did not
happen in real life here), but that's another issue.

>     I can't speak for other MTAs, but I know that sendmail can do
>     translation, and will do so by default under certain circumstances
>     (e.g., it has 8-bit input and the output is not indicated as being
>     8-bit clean).  I believe that the same can be said for postfix,
>     and I would have said the same for Exim.

Exim is 8bit clean, but AFAIK as an receiving MTA Exim is telling the
sending MTA that it is not.  Which causes the sending MTA to say "well,
then I'll have to recode all 8bit mails".  Exim does that because it
does not do any recoding on its own.  This is what I've been told by
folks who know these things better than me.

And probably this is the reason why Mailman does also recode 8bit mails
upon handing them to Exim (again, but not in the case of our non-public
admin list, which is still strange).

And I wouldn't even complain if Mailman would use qp encoding rather
than base64 encoding.

>     This seems to me to be a more MTA-like thing to do, whereas I
> would expect Mailman to just take whatever it's given and not perform
> any translation.  Have you found actual code within Mailman to
> perform this translation?

As this is the Mailman developer's list, I was hoping that the
developers would confirm or deny that. ;)  And probably point me at the
right place in the code.

Where should I look?


        Michael