[Mailman-Users] Subject Lines Wrapped After Commas, (LikeThis?)

[Mark Sapiro]

Mike Ewall wrote:
>
>Thanks for clarifying the terms for me and for explaining how the 
>subject line behavior works.  Unfortunately, this isn't the first 
>"feature" of Mailman that I see as a bug.  I don't know about other 
>email readers, but in Eudora, only the part of the subject before the 
>fold shows up in the table of contents, making this feature rather annoying.


It is the underlying Python email library that folds the Subject:
header and determines where to fold. You could argue that it shouldn't
give preference to foldable whitespace following a comma or semicolon
in the unencoded value of the subject as these aren't syntactically
significant in a subject, and that may be valid, but it is still
folding in a standards compliant manner.

I would argue that Eudora is much more at fault here for not unfolding
the subject before presenting it in its TOC.

What does Eudora do with RFC 2047 encoded Subject: headers such as the
example in section 8 of the RFC
(http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2047.html>.


>I'd very much prefer to have things folded without regard to commas, 
>as in your examples below.


If Eudora would unfold the header before putting as much as fits into
the subject field of its TOC, this wouldn't be an issue. From my point
of view, you're asking that Mailman, which is already standards
compliant, alter its behavior to compensate for a non-compliant MUA.


>Is there any way to configure Mailman not to fold at higher-level 
>syntactic breaks?


No. I think that this would require modifying the Header module in the
Python email library.

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