[nfb-talk] Character Conversion Question

[T. Joseph Carter]

David,

My setup is fetchmail, maildrop, and mutt.  That's "not standard" if your
definition of standard is Outlook and nothing but.  The rest of us are
going to be bitten by character set conversions because messages are
coming across with illegal characters in them, after they've been
stripped.

The HTML to text scrubbing just doesn't work right.  The mailman people
told me more than a year ago that you can't be using the standard thing
they have because the thing they have hasn't had these problems for
several years now.

Perhaps you have a recent mailman calling an older HTML-stripping script
that is left over from a previous version?


I can tell you, with certainty, that it is illegal according to the RFC
to have two text/plain attachments as part of a multipart/alternative MIME
block.  I don't do any scripts changing my messages in any way, and I get
that result.  First there's the text/plain part generated by Outlook,
which is properly 7-bit ASCII.  Then there's the part generated from the
HTML, which lies about its encoding and charset.

If Outlook is your standard, then there's no reason to strip out the HTML
at all.  Just defang and remote image tags and scripts that come through.
Those of us who have non-HTML mail readers (like mutt) will just have to
install the appropriate inline MIME viewers.  I will be happy to assist
you with HTML defanging in about two weeks when my classes end.  =)

On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 02:38:20PM -0600, David Andrews wrote:
> Joseph:
> 
> First, I will say that I am not an expert in mime encoding, html 
> messages etc.  So, there could be settings I could do to change 
> things.  However, I will also say that we are not removing 
> attachments or doing any kind of nonstandard scrubbing.  We use 
> Mailman and sendmail, with mostly standard settings, as do thousands 
> of other lists.
> 
> I believe you use a somewhat non-standard setup, and I don't see a 
> lot of conversion problems or complaints.
> 
> Different mail programs handle things in different ways, and users 
> can fiddle with things, so it may well not be us.