>Could someone please tell me exactly what happens if I send a message
>to a listserv list that has 8-bit characters (not QP encoded) in its
>body?
UNIX: First, make sure that your sendmail configuration is 8-bit compliant.
Check that it uses Msmpt8 instead of Msmtp, or modify the Msmtp line to
make it identical to the Msmtp line.
VM: Make sure that the STANDARD TCPXLATE really supports all the national
characters. By default, these are blanked out.
 
Then, unless all your subscribers are local to your LISTSERV, (someone
correct me please) make sure that all other LISTSERVs in the world that
will have to handle your mail have a sendmail or TCPXLATE file that does
that too!  (-: (but see below about MIME)
>
>Does the result depend on the presence of MIME headers in my message
Yes.
>or on the HDR settings of subscribers?
Oh, I don't know about that.
 
We urge our users here NOT to use Quoted printables here, because some
systems and programs (mainly, Vines mail and Usenet readers including
Netscape) don't support them. But then, when someone receives a
MIME-encoded message, it gets mangled (you know, these "=E9" sequences...)
unless his/her mail reader supports both MIME and non-MIME (Eudora, for
example).
 
I've been told this can be walked around with Listserv 1.8c, which has a
MIME user option. As soon as I have 1.8c, I will continue telling my people
to use non-MIME contributions, but I will SET some of my subscribers abroad
to that option and hopefully resolve some of my problems. Maybe you would
choose the other way around: the situation here in French Canada is not
necessarily the same as yours.
 
If you have big problems, maybe you will prefer not to use national
characters until you get 1.8c, but I, for one, had no big pitfalls since
the beginning, and we used to have French (well, what IBM calls the
Canadian Bilingual 3270 Code Page) lists since 1.7 under VM/CMS. Now I have
the 1.8 UNIX version and it still works. I also translated (most of) the
default.mailtpl file under the name francais.mailtpl and specified
Language=francais for most of our lists.
 
>I'd like as much details as pssible as I'm starting a French-speaking
>list and I'll have to answer this question over and over.
 
Be *absolutely* sure you comply to ISO-8859. If you have any other
questions (except about sendmail, please!! (-: ), n'hisitez pas `
m'icrire...! (did you receive these characters correctly? if so, you've got
one problem already solved...)
>
>Thanks
>
>Nicolas
 
De rien.
 
Jean Bedard, LISTSERV manager
Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada
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