Stephan Krinetzki writes:
We have been experiencing the following problem lately: When a user sends a mail with an unusually long subject to a mailing list, this subject is shortened.
Is this being observed by all subscribers? Especially subscribers with various different mail clients? Do you observe this when you look at the "original message"? (Different clients describe this function in different ways, but most mail clients allow you to look at all of the header and body text exactly as sent, with no formatting).
Here are the two examples:
Original subject: "[SAV-LINUX] Notice from Sophos Anti-Virus on lx1bcms-storage.physik.rwth-aachen.de" (82 characters long)
Subject in Mailman: "[edv-support][SAV-LINUX] Notice from Sophos Anti-Virus on" (57 characters long)
By design, Mailman does not truncate the subject, it folds it to multiple lines to conform to Internet mail standards which state that lines should be no longer than 78 characters. So, including adding the "edv-support" tag, a stock Mailman installation should be changing:
Subject: [SAV-LINUX] Notice from Sophos Anti-Virus on lx1bcms-storage.physik.rwth-aachen.de"
(all one line) to (two lines, split after "on" with the space starting the second line[1]:
Subject: [edv-support] [SAV-LINUX] Notice from Sophos Anti-Virus on lx1bcms-storage.physik.rwth-aachen.de"
A mail client that conforms to Internet mail standards might either display it exactly that way, or it might unfold it to a single line, or it might unfold it, then refold it to match the user's display width.
Of course if you look at the original text and there is no second line, that's a Mailman bug.
Is there any way to work around this?
If Mailman is folding the subject as described above, you'd have to patch the code, and maintain the patch across upgrades. I think the patch might be a little tricky because the code that does this is in the Python distribution, not in Mailman itself, if I remember correctly.
Alteratively, get people to use clients that properly handle Internet mail. Asking people to change their mail clients rarely goes over well though.
Regards, Steve
Footnotes: [1] The mail standards permit splitting header lines only on whitespace under certain conditions, not at hyphens and other punctuation as normal in English text.