[Mailman-Users] Garbled digest messages

[Mark Sapiro]

Rick Morrison wrote:

>I help run a private Mailman mailing list for a group that is occasionally
>seeing garbled messages in their plain-text digests. The garbled messages
>are completely unreadable, with every character of the original message
>being lost.
>
>The garbled messages seem to appear only when:
>
>- The original post is a multipart message
>- The "text/plain" part of the message uses a "utf-8" character set
>- The "text/plain" part of the message is set to "quoted-printable" encoding
>- and the "text/plain" part of the message does not appear to be quoted, but
>rather plain text - it looks like pure ASCII to me with no equal signs, and
>with unquoted CR/LF line endings
>
>I've tried suggesting mime digests, but the users have shunned them, and
>strongly prefer the plain-text digests.
>
>I'd include a sample of one of these messages, but the list's owners have
>advised that the material is sensitive.
>
>>From my "mm_cfg.py" file:
>   add_language('en', 'English (USA)', 'iso-8859-1', 'ltr')
>
>I had previously tried using "utf-8" for the setting, but users complained
>that the digests were unreadable.

utf-8 probably doesn't work for you because the Python email library
wants to base64 encode utf-8 message bodies, and the user's MUAs
aren't properly handling that.


What Mailman version?

By every character lost, do you mean replaced with a '?' or something
else.

Did you change from the default us-ascii for English in an attempt to
solve this or for some other reason?

Is it only the affected message that's garbled in the digest? I.e.
other messages in the digest are OK? Are the headers of the affected
message garbled too?

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