[Mailman-Users] Latin 1 characters

[Greg Ward]

On 09 August 2001, Pearu Peterson said:
> I have noticed that latin 1 (or rather non US ascii) characters are mapped
> to 3-strings starting with = character when messages are shown in the
> Mailman archive. For example,
> 
> TeX repr. -> Mailman (?) translation
> \~o -> =F5
> \~O -> =D5

That's called "quoted-printable" encoding.  Certain mail clients
emanating from a place called Redmond are believed to perpetrate this
encoding on the world.  IOW, it might not be Mailman's fault.

To find out, look in the mbox file for the appropriate list, eg.
  ~mailman/archives/{private,public}/foo.mbox/foo.mbox
for the "foo" list.  Look for messages with "=XX" in them.  See if those
messages have a "Content-encoding: quoted-printable" (or something like
that, I can't remember the exact spelling) header.

If so, then the originating mail client is doing the right thing, and
whoever renders the mail for the web (*probably* Pipermail, but I'm not
certain of this) is at fault -- it should probably undo the "=XX"
characters and turn them either back into Latin-1 (or whatever), or turn
them into HTML é thingies.  I *think* the former is more
appropriate if all you know is the encoding; if you also know the
character set, it gets trickier.

If there is no mention of "quoted-printable" in the header, somebody's
mail client is broken.  Dunno what to do then.

        Greg