The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Brent Emerson <address@concealed>]

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

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