>One of our new lists is entirely in French.  While we have it set to send
>through messages in French fine, the subscribers would like to be able to
>subscribe and send other commands with French accented characters in them.
>For example most of them have some sort of accent in their name.  Listserv
>seems to reject these commands.
>
>I told them I thought it couldn't be done, but I thought I'd check.  Is
>there any way to get Listserv to subscribe someone using accented
>characters in the name, or accept other commands where some component is a
>non-standard character?

I know this is possible because we have subscribers with accented
characters in their name.  We did have some trouble sending files to
LISTSERV for which a password was required, accented letters were
present, and the email software was using MIME Quoted-Printable
encoding.  This messed up the password.  But with software that sends
8-bit rather than QP, we have had no problems with this.

As for subscription commands, I believe  that messages sent using
Quoted-Printable rather than 8-bit might be problematic and not work in
some cases, but I don't know if any settings might allow LISTSERV to
decode commands using MIME types.  Of course, for some sites, 8-bit
characters may get their high bit stripped.

You may wish to take a look at our header for

 [log in to unmask]

to see if we are doing anything different, but I don't think we made any
conscious effort to make this work.

You may be able to fix the names of subs with QP characters by changing
the names using the SUB command and software that sends 8-bit mail.
Depending on your list size and turnover, this might not be too bad.
However, as soon as you try to fix the name of someone who is trying to
UNSUB, you'll create a very confused individual ;-)

Bob
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Ponterio                  | [log in to unmask]
co-manager of FLTEACH            | State Univ. of New York Cortland
Foreign Language Teaching Forum  |
http://www.cortland.edu/flteach/ | http://snycorva.cortland.edu/~ponterior/