Heather Madrone wrote: >At 9:03 PM -0500 4/13/05, Larry Stone wrote: >>On 4/13/05 8:20 PM, Brad Knowles at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> > At 6:14 PM -0700 2005-04-13, Heather Madrone wrote: >> >> Does anyone know why there are so many encoding errors with posts to this >>>> list? >>> >>> Encoding errors? What do you mean? >> >>I think she means this: >>[Error: Formatting error: Non-hexadecimal character in QP encoding] >>which I see in many list messages when logged into the shell on my computer >>and reading with pine (pine 4.58 running on MacOS X 10.3.8; for >>completeness, the MTA is whatever version of postfix came with Mac OS X >>10.3). I saw it in a message tonight: >> >>Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 18:22:26 -0500 >>From: Jess Mooers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>To: Mailman Users List <mailman-users@python.org> >>Subject: [Mailman-Users] MailMan Not Sending > >Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I'm wondering if it happens when >the messages are converted to plain text. Or maybe with the handling of >extended >ASCII characters. > >On this list, I see it with about 5% of the posts. I'm running the same >version of >Mailman as this list, and it doesn't happen on my list. > >It seems like bad advertising for Mailman, and I'd be interested in helping to >track >down the problem.
I believe the issue is this. The last line of the list footer for this list is: >Security Policy: >http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp Equal signs are special in quoted-printable encoding; the introduce a two hex digit character code. Thus in quoted-printable encoding, '=fa' stands for the character whose hex value is FA, but '=sh' is an error. Now, normally, when the body of a message has content type other than text/plain or a character set that is different from the list's character set, the footer is added as a separate MIME part (see http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.039.htp). I thought that was also the case when the body was encoded quoted-printable or base64. I'm still pretty sure it is the case with base64, but apparently it isn't the case with quoted-printable. What is happening here is the original post has Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable and the footer is just being added to the end of the body. Then the recipients MUA decodes the quoted-printable message body which includes the footer and encounters the error on the '=sh'. I haven't looked at the Mailman code for this, but the solution would be to insure that if the message has Content-Transfer-Encoding: other than 7bit or 8bit, the footer is placed in a separate MIME part. Or, in this case if possible, to link to the FAQ article without using '=', but given the FAQ wizard, I don't think it is possible. Note that neither %3D nor D; is an acceptable substitute for '=' in this context in the cgi URL >A rolling stone gathers no mass. Actually, according to special relativity, if it is accelerating, it does :-) -- Mark Sapiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
