Hello Ben Parker, hello list owners,

> >is there anybody who has to deal with German umlauts (ä, ö, ü) or
> >other non-ASCII characters in the subject of mails?

> Had you included these characters in the Subject: Line it would look like this
> in 'raw' (MIME encoded) form:
> Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:_German_umlauts_(=E4,_=F6,_=FC)_in_subject?=

Yes.

> Obviously this creates a parsing problem, as well as the fact that not all mail
> programs can display this correctly.

If every member of the list used a MIME compatible mail program there
would be no problem (I think), but unfortunately the widespread MS
Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger are not compatible (IIRC).

The fact that non-MIME-compatible mail programs can´t display MIME
encoded characters correctly is just a problem of the single user.
But by answering he then creates a "new" subject like
=Re: ?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:_German_umlauts_(=E4,_=F6,_=FC)_in_subject?=


> >Is LISTSERV able to exchange uncorrect characters in the subject by
> >other characters, e.g. "ae" instead of "ä" or "Re:" instead of "AW:"?

> No.  Such language transformations and character 'cleanup' are not currently
> possible in LISTSERV.  This may become possible in a future version.

As LISTSERV is already able to reduce a "Re: [Listname] Re: ..." to
"[Listname] Re: ..." and is able to add the name of the mailing list
in each subject I hoped there is some possibility to exchange other
characters. No chance yet?

Schöne Grüße
Erwin Weiblen