D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I'm receiving much of my email through an ancient server. I hope to fix that.
Some of my messages from the GTALUG list are dammaged. Basically, the newlines are lost. I suspect that this is due to my server, but at least some of the problem is the GTALUG list handling software.
For example, Chris Browne just sent a message to the list and CCed me. The copy that went directly was fine. The copy that went through the GTALUG is mangled.
The direct copy was transmitted in plain text, UTF-8: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
The copy from the list had been changed to base64 by the list sofware: X-MIME-Autoconverted: from base64 to 8bit by gw-d.mimosa.com id v2EGxaHB032483
I expect that my systems MIME Autoconverter is wrong but why is the list software creating base64 where none existed before?
Other observations:
Not all my mail goes through that gateway. The simple (non-MIME) messages that come via another gateway seem to all be in base 64. Why?
Not all my GTALUG mail that goes through that gateway gets mangled. For example, the message about dinner that I sent to the list didn't get mangled.
This seems to have started happening in late September.
Mailman (actually the underlying Python email library) converts emails to base64 if whose character set is UTF-8 on English lists (it is avoiding creating messages containing characters with high order bit set as not all METs support 8BITMIME SMTP (Yahoo and Outlook.com)). If we were to remove the `msg_footer`, that three line footer we have on every email, then Mailman would just forward as is. Just another example of why email lists suck in 2017.