[Mailman-Users] Encoding problems

[Brad Knowles]

On 6/17/08, Allan Odgaard wrote:

>  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.

True enough, but the ISO Latin-1 encoding should be sufficient for 
most European subscribers.  And many of the developers for Python in 
general and Mailman in particular are from European countries, so 
internationalization is an issue that we pay a lot of attention to.

In fact, waiting for i18n to catch up is what tends to delay our 
major releases by at least a month or two -- the basic code is there 
and ready to go, but the localization strings in the various 
languages aren't.

>  The mailing list letters are correct _except_ that the body now 
>contains this:
>
>     Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>     Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

The charset is exactly what you previously created.  The 
content-transfer-encoding is standard MIME encoding for non-ASCII 
charsets that cannot be represented in quoted-printable, or where 
more than a certain percentage of characters in a given message would 
have to be encoded.

There's absolutely nothing abnormal about that.

>  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?

The charset would have been set at list creation time, yes.  But the 
content-transfer-encoding settings follows from standard practice for 
MIME encoding.


If you want to go fix the MIME encoding routines to work some other 
way, you're going to have a lot more heavy lifting to do.  Among 
other things, all your changes to this code will get wiped out with 
the next upgrade, so you'll need to make sure you keep a copy to the 
side which you can use to re-patch the code to implement things the 
way you want them.

Alternatively, go talk to the authors of the MIME encoding routines 
and see if you can get them to change their minds.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>