Comment 5 for bug 373083

Yes, the header/footer might be written in the list's preferred language, but the emails sent to the list are supposed to be in that language as well, or? So I see no advantage in trying the LCSET first.

There are however many opposite situations where having MCSET first would be a clear advantage. Many international lists are using English as default language and this means us-ascii. Anyone posting to this list in any variant of iso-8859-*, windows-125* or utf-8 will have charset which is capable to absorb all ascii chars from the header/footer, but trying LCSET first almost always fails just because the poster happens to have some accentuated character in his name or in his signature.

Last but not least, I believe the listserver is supposed to distribute mail 'as is' without any unnecessary conversions. I mentioned two examples above where an unneeded conversion causes trouble. Thus I believe addition of header/footer should be as non-intrusive as possible by default.

Note that "downgrading" of email body from utf-8 to any iso-8859-* variant by default is a serious problem, and should be avoided by all means - since instead of fully unambiguous representation for any character you're going to receive body which couldn't be properly interpreted without additional information (the charset designation). There are 22 languages using iso-8859-* charsets in mailman 2.1.12, which are hit by this.