[Mailman-Users] Encoding problems

[Allan Odgaard]

Some of my subscribers have accents and similar in their name and I  
had to do the following post install to have Mailman properly work  
with these:

## CLI

In order to get `list_members -f «list»` to properly output non-ASCII  
user names I had to put the following:

     import sys
     sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

Into `/etc/python2.5/sitecustomize.py`. This is despite proper setup  
of `LC_CTYPE` on the system. Seems to me Mailman should use the  
encoding of the current locale, not this site-wide Python default  
encoding (settable by root only).

## Web

For the web page forms to accept non-ASCII I had to put this:

     add_language('en', 'English', 'utf-8')

Into `/etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py`. I think utf-8 should be the default  
because even on an English list, you can use non-ASCII punctuation,  
glyphs, and many European subscribers will have non-ASCII in their  
names.

## Mailing List

The mailing list letters are correct _except_ that the body now  
contains this:

     Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
     Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

And yes, each letter sent to the list is converted into base64.

I tried disabling the above utf-8 changes, but it did not seem to fix  
it. But it might be that the list language (containing utf-8) was  
copied at list creation time, so I will effectively have to recreate  
the list (or write Python code) to change this?


Using Mailman 2.1.9 (Ubuntu installation).