[Mailman-Developers] 8bit and NNTP gateway

J C Lawrence claw at kanga.nu
Thu Sep 23 07:22:00 CEST 2004


On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 17:57:03 -0700 
John W Baxter <jwblist at olympus.net> wrote:
> On 9/21/2004 1:14, "Brad Knowles" <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> wrote:
>> At 11:24 PM -0400 2004-09-20, J C Lawrence wrote:
 
>>> Are there any extant tools to detect 8bit mail (identified by a
>>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit or not) and to suitably transform
>>> the affected MIME parts (or base message if no MIME) to
>>> quoted-printable?

>> The easy way to handle this is to configure your MTA so that it
>> thinks that it is 7-bit only, and it should do the conversion for
>> you.  Sendmail certainly does this, and I'm pretty sure postfix does
>> too.  Not sure about any of the others.

> Exim by default is configured to not advertise 8BITMIME and to reject
> offered 8 bit messages.  It doesn't try to transcode.  

The actual background for the problem is that I have 8bit messages in my
archives that I need to import into newsgroups.  

> And since it doesn't, it can't accept 8 bit messages for relay since
> it would have to do the conversion if the relay target doesn't accept
> 8 bit.

Much as you identify, I can prevent the problem from occurring via Exim
in future.  My problem is the archives and any other potential message
acquisition paths which don't pass through Exim, and yet which will need
both NNTP injection and broadcast via Mailman and Exim.

> If that's an issue in a given installation, then Exim is the wrong MTA
> choice.  Exim is unlikely to be taught to do the conversions.

That's where filters come in.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.


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