Developers of Sympa

[Adam Bernstein <address@concealed>]

Here's a reposting of a question from my colleague Brent, which has so far 
gone unanswered on sympa-users, so I thought I'd try it here.  Any help? 
We'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!
       adam

Hi,

I work with a group of folks who've been hosting hundreds of lists on Sympa 
for several years now, and when our users ask questions about MIME parts 
being corrupted or changing in transit through Sympa, we always had the 
answer "Sympa doesn't change anything about the content of your messages, 
so don't blame Sympa."  Recently, however, we noticed a message where a 
text/html part using quoted-printable encoding was substantially different 
when processed through a Sympa-hosted list compared with the version sent 
direct from the sender.  The same thing happened to a base64-endoded 
image/gif part in the same message.  Nothing else was altered about the 
message or its MIME structure.

In the quoted-printable encoding, Sympa seems to have changed line breaks 
to make the lines a bit longer.  In the base64 encoding, Sympa seems to 
have altered the original 76-character lines to 60-character lines.  In 
both cases, the Sympa-altered text decodes to the same destination HTML and 
image as the original text did, so it's not necessarily breaking anything. 
 However, some message recipients have complained that their clients are 
having problems with the Sympa-processed messages and not the originals, so 
we're trying to understand what Sympa is doing.

So, my question: is Sympa supposed to be decoding and re-encoding these 
MIME parts?  If not, any hints about how we can determine what's going 
wrong?  If, on the other hand, Sympa is designed to decode and re-encode, 
why?  Can we turn that behavior off so it just re-sends these parts unmolested?

We're using Sympa 5.1.2 with perl 5.8.8 and probably the latest versions of 
all of Sympa's perl module dependencies.

Brent Emerson