lists-mailman3@janaberger.de writes:
I have a setup with GNU Mailman 3.3.8 where a user tried to subscribe. When replying to the "confirm" message, the user received a completely garbled response, like so:
N?z??? ??zf???&???j?????u?[zZ0:???v???,j?z???k?e?0
4D???r?^b??r?????*'???y????{ax?L?X????0:???v???,j?z???k?d?m?-???zz?r n??l]y+???-E?(
?^N??'??M???t???Mz?????^i?????}?o?\????6sN?zf??????r??z?????????b?{h?????f?r?ne==
To diagnose, we really need to see that in context of the raw message as received by the user. You can see the same or similar result by opening the EML I quoted. Does
On 22.09.2023 18:32, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: the list support attachments? Then I will attach the file directly.
The user then forwarded the .eml file to me, which clearly shows the contents of the mail as plain text while being announced as base64 (Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64):
It also clearly doesn't show anything like the mojibake above. What is the relation between the two?
Sorry, I should have made that clearer - when opening the EML file with e.g. Thunderbird, the contents (message text) of the mail as displayed is the garbled string. I assume it is the result of Thunderbird trying to process the contents as base64-encoded, which it is not.
While the problems could be related to Mailman, it could also be any MTA along the way or the user's mail client.
I suspect that the .eml file has been significantly altered by intervening software. As far as I know, the Python email package does not MIME-encode plain ASCII text as you see in the email's subject.
I have multiple control messages, all received from my instance which all contain the "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64" marker, their contents is plain text (Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"), but they are still encoded using base64.
Of course that is not proof, but an indication that it is either done by the mail server itself or widely across MUAs.
The only other thing I can think of is it might have something to do with your internationalization settings. What is the default language of the list? (This is available in Postorius.) Have you changed the default encoding for English on your site? (I think you need to look in mailman.cfg for this.) What is the default language of the site?
Global "Preferred language" is "English (USA)", which is not overridden by the list in question. I have not changed the default encoding. Is there a surefire way to detect this?
My mailman.cfg has no section pertaining to encoding, and all related files also do not mention encoding.