Forwarded mail with national characters in the subject can be improperly encoded

If you forward a mail where the subject includes national ch

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:38:15 +0000

If you forward a mail where the subject includes national characters when the receiver views the message the "Forwarded Message: [subject]" line can display the "[subject]" incorrectly. The underlying cause is that the name parameter of the Content-Type header is marked with the wrong charset. In our case, for example, the text was in UTF-8 but was marked as us-ascii. Attached is a working patch but I have to admit I don't really like the solution. A lot of mail clients (well, Microsoft's anyway) don't always handle MIME messages correctly and assume the first character encoding they stumble over is the one that applies for everything in the message. In this case they will see utf-8 whereas the actual message may have other/another encoding for other MIME parts.

I'm not sure I understood the issue correctly. Can you uploa

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:41:06 +0000

I'm not sure I understood the issue correctly. Can you upload a message that is incorrectly forwarded? Which forwarding method do you use? And which is your default charset for sending messages?

jnnnnnnnnnnnklmk;kl;mlm;lmkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkklnnjkn

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:07:14 +0000

jnnnnnnnnnnnklmk;kl;mlm;lmkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkklnnjkn

Sorry about that. Should have added more complete informati

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:34:28 +0000

Sorry about that. Should have added more complete information and a scenario. The scenario is: User A sends a mail to User B where the subject of the mail includes national characters, in this case Swedish characters. The encoding selected before sending the mail is iso-8859-1. User B opens the mail, selects "Forward Entire Message", and chooses to send the mail with the original message as an inline attachment. B also selects iso-8859-1 as the encoding and sends it to User C. When C opens the mail, the subject is fine but in the "parts" listing you'll see "Forwarded Message: " where is the subject but where the UTF-8 characters are displayed literally for the national characters. Attached is forwarded_message.jpg which makes it a lot clearer ( is circled in the image). I've also attached the MIME message. As you see in the MIME message, the "name" parameter of the message/rfc822 Content-Type header is marked as being encoded in us-ascii, but because we are running everything to output UTF-8 the actual text string set on the name parameter is UTF-8 encoded. Not sure our web output encoding is really important since when the message/rfc822 MIME_Part is created no encoding was being set so it defaulted to us-ascii as it should, but this affected the value of the name parameter of the Content-Type header where the code assumes it is already in whatever character set that applies to the part.

Wasn't this already fixed by this change from a month ago?

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:07:32 +0000

Wasn't this already fixed by this change from a month ago? http://cvs.horde.org/diff.php/imp/lib/Compose.php?r1=1.365&r2=1.366

Completely missed that one. Case closed. Sorry for the tro

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:29:10 +0000

Completely missed that one. Case closed. Sorry for the trouble.