[Mailman-Developers] Ham, mailing lists, and oddball character sets

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Cristóbal Palmer writes:
 > On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 12:32:42PM -0600, Philip A. Prindeville wrote:
 > > 
 > > And thereby, it would be trivial to bounce a message sent to an
 > > English-language only mailing list that wasn't encoded in USASCII or
 > > Latin1 (iso-8859-1) as the charset.
 > > 
 > > But alas they don't.
 > 
 > It still wouldn't be trivial even if they did. What about people who
 > put their normal, proper names in their signatures. Maybe they're
 > Greek. Maybe they're Taiwanese....

Or maybe they're returned ex-pats with fond memories (and perhaps
family) of their former host countries.  There is also the problem of
Windose-1252, with various punctuation marks not available in ISO
8859-1, not to mention the even further extended set available in
Unicode.  Let's not annoy the punctuation pedants!

But Philip already addressed these issues by saying make it
configurable.  I think that's reasonable as long as the list owner is
made aware that she's probably going to trash posts from some of her
members, and sooner, rather than later.  If she wants to blame the
victims for not following the rules and the spammers for the rules,
that's her problem, no?

In any case, people with horked MUAs are surely used to being
maltreated by software; they're almost certainly using MS or Apple
products, no?<wink>