[KS] TECHNICAL note #2

[Frank Hoffmann]

Thank you for your assistance to get this solved! I received about 10  
messages, all reporting that Asian characters as well as special  
non-ASCII characters for transcrition (ŭ, ō, etc.) are only being  
displayed as questionmarks or square boxes.

All scholars writing were pointing out that they receive messages in  
daily "digest" form--not one by one. That was really the only common  
ground there, as everyone was using different operating systems and  
different email applications.

SOLUTION(s):

(1) Simply stop using "digest" mode and receive messages one by one.
Login to the KS List options (your subscriber options):
http://koreaweb.ws/mailman/listinfo/koreanstudies_koreaweb.ws
Now look for the section marked "Digest Mode" checkbox and disable  
that -- so you get messages one by one instead of digest mode.

If this is really not what you want at all, then please try solution #2:

(2) Login to the KS List options (your subscriber options):
http://koreaweb.ws/mailman/listinfo/koreanstudies_koreaweb.ws
Then look for the section marked "Get MIME or Plain Text Digests?."
Set it to "MIME" to receive digests in MIME format (it is now set to PLAIN).

After that, you should hopefully be able to read Asian charcters  
**if** you are using a relatively new email program (and NOT a Korean  
program encoded for local usage only, not EUC-KR).

FURTHER EXPMANATION:
"MIME" controls whether a plain text format or one that allows other  
MIME types is the default format being sent out by the list. MIME  
stands for "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions" and is an Internet  
standard that extends the format of email to support non-ASCII  
characters, multi-part attachments, and non-text attachments. The list  
DEFAULT was set to "PLAIN" and not MIME. So anyone who subscribed AND  
choose "digest" format was automatically set to PLAIN. That made sense  
when we first used Mailman sofware in the late 1990s, because many of  
the more simple mail applications/programs did not yet understand  
MIME. I have now changed this default to MIME (for new subscribers),  
but I have NOT changed the setting for existing list subscribers ...  
simply because I am not 100% sure that this is the only cause for the  
problem, and because there may be some subscribers who have a reason  
for this setting, and I do not want to just overwrite that.

A Mailman GUIDE can be found here:
http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Mailman+2.1+Members+Manual
Under 8.2 you will find further explanations about MIME.

Mailman software is not perfect. As you will find out when reading  
through some related postings at the developer's Mailman mailing list  
a ton of compromises were made, also because of the many different  
local encodings around, but also for historical reasons. Eventually it  
will all be UTF-8 (Unicode) though. Mailman is now at version 2.1.4,  
but a beta version 3 is already out. Hopefully that will work better  
with Asian scripts.



Thanks.

Frank