[Mailman-Users] Encoding problems

[Mark Sapiro]

Allan Odgaard wrote:

>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).


I am aware of this issue, but I think the place to fix it is Python,
not Mailman.


>## 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.


The web UI is scheduled for overhaul. This will probably be addressed.


>## 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.


Again, this is the Python email library. If you prefer
quoted-printable, set the language's charset to iso-8859-1.


>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 list's preferred language was set at list create time and can be
changed at any time thereafter, but nothing about that language's
charset is in the list config.

Did you restart Mailman after removing

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

from mm_cfg.py? If so, and you're still getting utf-8 encoded list
mail, the incoming posts are probably utf-8 encoded.

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