[Mailman3-dev] Mailman 3 features

[Barry Warsaw]

On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 02:30, Rene Hertell wrote:

> For the moment it seems to me that the current version of Mailman has
> some problems in handling foreign languages that uses characters that
> are outside the us ASCII character set. One example is when the list
> is running in the Finnish language, and it receives an email with
> characters like å,ä and ö (å ä ö) in the
> subject-field. It seems like Mailman fails to update the
> message-achieve because of this.

I think the basic problem is that internationalization was wedged into
Mailman 2 instead of being designed for it from the start.  The key is
probably to treat all strings internally as Unicode instead of 8-bit
strings, converting to and from Unicode at the edges.  That's the
general approach that Zope 3 takes and I think it's the only rational
approach for handling non-ASCII character sets.  Note that we may have
to modify the email package to help with this, but the email-sig does
have a mission to produce version 3.0 for Python 2.4.

-Barry