[Mailman-Users] Base64 Encoding -Greek characters- Part oftheproblem solved

[Mark Sapiro]

test at social.soc.uoc.gr wrote:
>
>I sent an email to "mylist" containing greek characters.
>Then, i opened mailman's web interface as the list's moderator to decide
>about the fate of the incoming email.
>In the email's body there were unreadable characters such as =E1=E2=E3.

These are quoted-printable encoded characters (each
non-us-ascii-printable 8-bit byte is encoded as an '=' followed by two
hex digits). In the iso-8859-7 character set they correspond to the
upper case greek letters alpha, beta and gamma.


>Then, i chose "Additionally, forward this message to:
>anotherguy at mydomain.com" and then "Approve".
>
>The members of the list received unreadable base64 encoded characters
>while the anotherguy at mydomain.com received proper greek characters.
>
>Is this not strange?


No, it is not strange at all. The forwarded message was sent as is to
the address you forwarded it to. That address received the
quoted-printable encoded message and the MUA used to view it
understood and properly decoded the quoted-printable encoding.

The list message probably had a msg_header or msg_footer added or some
other Mailman manipulation done to it that caused Mailman to reset the
contents of the message body which in turn cause the Python email
library to encode the body with its encoding for iso-8859-7 (or
windows-1253) which is base64.

I doubt very much that Mailman's encoding or not encoding the message
body as base64 is really caused by the presence/absence of the
mailscanner headers. I think you probably also changed some list
configuration (such as removing msg_footer) at the same time and this
is what changed Mailman's behavior.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan