[Mailman-Users] [Fwd: Mails get lost with different 2.1.x mailmans, including today's CVS]

[Tonu Samuel]

Seems that mailman-developers list is dead. No approval/reject happaned
within acceptable time.
-----Forwarded Message-----

From: Tonu Samuel <tonu at spam.ee>
To: mailman-developers at python.org
Subject: Mails get lost with different 2.1.x mailmans, including today's CVS
Date: 28 Apr 2003 15:59:53 +0300

New to this list but checked FAQ. Was not able to find solution. I am
using mailman from CVS and this bug seems to be unfixed.

Description:

We are running company with 200 computer workstations and over 20 lists
on mailman. Once our user was able to prove, that sometime mailman just
deletes the subject. Instead of original subject we have "[foo] (no
subject)". 

My first reaction was to upgrade mailman. I did "cvs update" and
behaviour changed - no mails come through from this user. I believe
after many tests I knopw what is the issue but I do not want to dig into
Python code. Hope, someone else can fix it.

We are located in Estonia and our native language uses some unique
characters &auml; and &otilde; (in HTML terms). At some point Microsoft
invented new charset "Windows-1257" while actually "ISO8859-15" covers
our needs. Many kind of software tries to interpret charsets and gets
confused on pretty usual characters because this "windows-1257".

I have no power to make different people change their country settings.
Only way is to make software act different when unknown charset appears.
Mailman currently "eats" characters with unknown charsets and this is
bad for us.

Original mail subject line in raw data:

Subject: =?windows-1257?Q?FW:_=E4=E4test_kustutage_=E4ra?=

And this makes mailman to loose mail. With latest version it archives
mail without subject and never sends it out to subscribers. No error
messages sent to anyone indicating mail loss. In some point it saved
this mail in "shunt" folder but mail lost without any tracks after
"unshunt" command.

Any fixes? ideas? I propose to include bytes from unknown charsets in
redistributed mails. If this seems not possible, read "windows-1257" as
ISO8859-15 and I think it will work for most cases.

-- 
Tonu Samuel <tonu at spam.ee>
-- 
Tonu Samuel <tonu at spam.ee>