[Mailman-Users] Re: Footer ?

[Ben Gertzfield]

jsmith wrote:

>I have sent a post similar to this previously but it has been a while.
>At home I am using outlook.
>

>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>Content-Language: en
>

jsmith,

Here's your problem.  This email is flagged as using the UTF-8 character 
set (Unicode). 

I'll guess your list is not set for US English as its preferred 
language, is that correct?

If that's the case, Mailman **CANNOT** simply append the footer, which 
is most likely in the incompatible ISO-8859-1 character set, to this 
email without possibly corrupting it -- if there were any ISO-8859-1 
characters in the footer, like German ü, the entire UTF-8 message could 
be garbled, or it could even corrupt someone's email terminal and make 
it unreadable!  (I've personally had this happen, and it's not pretty.)

For what it's worth, I didn't see any footer (attachment or otherwise) 
on the message you posted.  Did you have footers turned off completely 
on that list?

In any case, Mailman does the best it can and attaches the footer as an 
"inline" attachment flagged as ISO-8859-1, which is supposed to be 
displayed at the bottom of the message (not as an attachment).  Outlook 
does not support inline text attachments, for whatever reason, although 
many other mail programs do.

There is a patch available that Tokio Kikuchi wrote that tries to 
convert everything to UTF-8 when necessary to make a "best attempt" at 
adding the footer directly, not as an attachment, if possible.  This 
patch may solve your issue.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=664209&group_id=103&atid=300103

Also, you can try setting your list for US English as its preferred 
language.  The mailman-users list is set for US English, which is why it 
can safely add its footers to just about any message. (US English uses 
the "us-ascii" character set, which is safe to append to UTF-8 or other 
messages.)

Ben