[Mailman-Users] Attachments - archives and encoding problems

John Papapanos writes:
This is not a "problem" that can be "solved". Mailman (or some other
mail program) here is conforming to the recommendation in the
standards that lines in mail bodies be broken at a reasonable length.
Since this behavior is recommended, rather than required, a patch to
provide an option has a good chance of being accepted I should think.
(As a supporter of standards, I hope the core developers will choose
to spend their time improving conforming behavior, not providing
options for the benefit of those who use non-conforming MUAs!)

It might also be possible to use an 8-bit transfer encoding for the
body which might relax the line length limit, I forget exactly what
the standards say about that. However, I don't think Mailman
currently supports that as an option. :-(
What do you mean by "scrambled"? Can you give a URL where we can
observe this? What web browser do you use? How is it configured for
viewing non-ASCII/ISO-8859-1 encodings?

Here is a URL where I created a list for testing
mailman.

https://mail.bioacademy.gr/pipermail/testlist2/2007-May/thread.html

I have sent several mails to the lists using
iso-8859-1 and iso-8859-7 encodings.

The 2nd and 3rd mails do not really hava an attachment
(forgot to actually attach the file)

Check out the mail with the subject
[Testlist2] Mail sent as iso-8859-7 image attachment

It is not readable. I can't figure out what encoding
is actually used.

I sent the mails using thunderbird by changing the
outgoing mail character encoding in the preferences.

I use firefox to display the web archives. And I
change
the character encoding view settings when the encoding

is not autodetected.


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Mailman developers: I've submitted a bug on the SF tracker (what, no
Jira yet?) #1712034. What I write below is all I've got for now, and
it's on the tracker; bug/patch traffic will followup to the tracker.

Reply-To set to mailman-users.

John Papapanos writes:
Thanks! As usual, seeing is believing.

Wow! That's amazingly broken. What's I'm pretty sure is happening is
that the archive contains raw message content in a MIME QP or
transfer-encoding, which cannot be properly decoded because the
Content-Transfer-Encoding header has been stripped (AFAIK it's
actually prohibited in HTTP, cf RFC 2616 section 19.5).

The reason that the Greek text-only comes out OK is that your browser
interprets the { notation in the message body as SGML entities,
which are Unicode.

To fix this, you *will* have to patch your Mailman installation, or
get an alternative archiver (there are instructions for using MHonArc
in the FAQ). There's not going to be a way to configure around this,
I'm pretty sure.

The patch may be trivial, but I won't be able to look at it for a day
or two. Maybe Mark, Barry, or Tokio can.

Hi,
Your site use Mailman-2.1.5 which is way too old. Upgrade to the
current version (2.1.9) and try again.

ok that was it. Mailman 2.1.9 solves this problem.
My initial choice of mailman-2.1.5 was because it was
provided as a package from my linux dist (ubuntu
server).

After I built and configured mailman-2.1.9 from
scratch
everything worked as expected. Also the URLs for the
attachments in the archives pages are not broken
anymore.

Many thanks.




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