In article <1162172094.005719.211880@e64g2000cwd.googlegroups .com>
SireBelch@gmail.com writes:
>I've spent the past 2 days googling and experimenting with my
>sendmail.cf files, and I continue to be stumped.
>
>I have a few different boxes that run sendmail. The old RedHat AS2.1
>(based on redhat 7) as well as all my freebsd boxes seem to work just
>fine. The Redhat box runs 8.12.11. The freebsd box runs 8.13.3. Both of
>these work fine.
>
>Then, there are the ones I have trouble with, both running redhat AS4.0
>with sendmail 8.13.1.

And from this you conclude that somethng changed between sendmail
8.12.11 and 8.13.1, and then changed back again in 8.13.3 - rather than
that there is something different with your RH AS4.0?

>I have an e-mail list dispatching program which our client uses to send
>messages to their staff. They create html email messages in Microsoft
>Word, save them as HTML, and then copy and paste the source into the
>mailer for html-email dispatch.
>
>On the old Red Hat machine and the new freebsd machine, this works
>wonderfully. However on the new redhat machine (as well as a recently
>tried ubuntu box running postfix),

And you *still* think it's a sendmail issue?:-)

> the extended ascii characters that
>Microsoft Word uses turn to gibberish. Examples of this are the
>italicized left and right quote marks instead of plain old
>shift-apostrophe quote marks - those get converted to junk like a
>lowercase-a with a carat mark, then a euro sign, then a square box.
>Spaces get converted to uppercase A's with a carat on top. Some
>apostrophes turn into a-with-carat, euro sign, TM symbol.
>
>While I'm somewhat dense about sendmail configuration, I was able to
>figure out that this clearly had something to do with the character set
>encoding that was (or wasn't) being set by my MTA.

MTAs are not supposed to set character set encodings, that's for the MUA
to do - i.e. in your case probably the "e-mail list dispatching
program". I would guess from your description that in the cases where
you have problems, something on the way to from the user to the MTA
turns the "extended ascii" characters into utf-8, whereas before they
were left as-is. Sendmail doesn't care much either way, but the
recipients can't make sense of the utf-8 when it isn't labeled as such.

>While the finger could be pointed at the mailer program and/or the
>filthy HTML that Microsoft Word generates, the fact is that on the old
>RedHat box and the new freebsd boxes, the e-mail dispatch blasts out
>just fine with no stray characters - while on the new redhat boxes
>(some of which running OLDER versions of sendmail than the freebsd
>system) the email becomes trashy.

So again, everything points to an OS "issue". I believe that looking
into the locale settings of the environment where your mailer program
runs may be useful - i.e. LANG and LC_* settings, and possibly also
settings for the terminal emulator where the "pasting" happens. But
either way your mailer program should pass a complete message to
sendmail, including any MIME headers needed to properly declare the body
contents.

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org