[Mailman-Users] Non-ASCII signs in welcome text

What is the list's preferred language? If it is English (or if it was
English when you set the welcome_msg), this is expected because
Mailman's character set for English is us-ascii and the page you're
posting from was sent with charset=us-ascii so your browser sends the
non-ascii characters as numeric html entities.

If the list's preferred language is German, whose charset is iso-8859-1,
when you set the welcome_msg, this should not happen.


The reason you see the numeric HTML entities rather that the browser's
rendering of them is over-protective escaping of the '&' in the HTML
entity, but in this case, that's actually appropriate because the
ultimate use of this message is in a plain text email where the HTML
entities won't be rendered as characters anyway.

Indeed. The problem is that Mailman assumes a list is English by
default. If I create a new list, I start editing its settings. What
you see first, is the welcome message etc. Only afterwards, I click
through to the language settings and change it to German. This causes
the problem.

So a useful RFE would be to either not assume English, or to ask for the
language at setup (or at first administrator login, since often a
sysadmin will create the list and then hand it over to the list admin).

Also, I noticed it is not possible to *remove* English as a list
language. I do not see why. I certainly don?t need it in my lists.
Yes. Caution is good, but isn?t this exaggerated?

H.

Hendrik Maryns writes:
No. It's not just your systems that are at risk. Mine are, too.
Remember, almost all of these measures are taken because someone has
demonstrated a similar exploit, and most exploits are not done for
their own sake, but rather to achieve a platform for cracking more
systems.

Of course, if you're a security expert and know what risks are
present, and are sure they don't apply to your system, Mailman is open
source, you can change it. If that sounds like too much work, don't
you see that probably means you don't really have enough resources to
change the settings and still be secure? On the other hand, systems
and their environments are infinitely variable. The Mailman
developers can not know enough about your system to make those
decisions, either.

It's already there - see the documentation for DEFAULT_SERVER_LANGUAGE
in Defaults.py.

Set

DEFAULT_SERVER_LANGUAGE = 'de'

in mm_cfg.py and lists will be created with German as their
preferred_language.

I?ll mention this to the server administration, thanks!

H.