[Mailman-Users] My mailman-users digests have bad MIME formatting

[Bob Glickstein]

Bob Glickstein writes:
> The daily digest of mailman-users messages I receive has broken MIME
> multipart structure.

Well, there's another bug: my report about the first bug was mangled
by mailman's digest-creation code.

My previous message included lines consisting solely of the character
sequence dash-dash-underscore-underscore-dash-dash-underscore-
underscore-dash-dash, to illustrate the sequence of MIME boundaries in
a sample digest message.  But because that very sequence of characters
is used by mailman as a MIME digest separator, mailman correctly
decided to alter those lines in the text of my message to avoid them
being misinterpreted as structure.  However, it did the alteration in
a non-reversible way: it added a blank space after the first two
dashes.  (It also added a second space before the last two dashes in
the line representing the closing boundary.)

I can think of two better approaches off the top of my head.  One is
to qp-encode lines that might be mistaken for MIME boundaries.
Another is not to reuse predictable boundary strings, but to generate
new ones each time that are very unlikely to cause collisions.

As before, I'm happy to help make the software better; just tell me
whether my help is needed.