GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 502178
Mail title encoding isn't correctly decoded
Last modified: 2008-05-09 15:42:58 UTC
Please describe the problem: Hi, Evolution doesn't decode very well mail titles. To be honest, the encoding is probably not following the RFC to the letter, but hey, any other mailer manages to display them properly, so I think a bugfix is long overdue. Steps to reproduce: Try to find someone sending you mail from a broken mailer. I'll submit some samples. Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? It does heppen only on some particular mails. Other information:
Here is a mail header where the subject is printed verbatim, instead of being decoded: From: Dell OrderWatch <orderwatch@dell.com> To: OrderWatch Subscriber <XAVIER.BESTEL@FREE.FR> Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 02:05:51 (GMT) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-mailer: AspMail 4.0 4.03 (SMT483EC2F) Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Service Dell OrderWatch - Votre commande a =E9t=E9 exp=E9di=E9e!?= Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-Path: orderwatch@dell.com
Here is another one: To: ll-attac35@attac.org, membres@aful.org, april@april.org Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:49:47 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.8 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <200601111749.48362.patrick_sinz@yahoo.com> X-Loop: april@april.org X-Sequence: 1637 Errors-to: april-owner@april.org Precedence: list X-no-archive: yes List-Id: <april.april.org> List-Help: <mailto:sympa@april.org?subject=help> List-Subscribe: <mailto:sympa@april.org?subject=subscribe%20april> List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:sympa@april.org?subject=unsubscribe%20april> List-Post: <mailto:april@april.org> List-Owner: <mailto:april-request@april.org> List-Archive: <http://www.april.org/wws/arc/april> Subject: [APRIL] Films en "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Cr=E9atives?= Commons"
Two other Subject lines: Subject: Re: Oula =?ISO-8859-1?B?5w==?=a fait mal.... Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?No=EBl commence chez Europeen Trading !!!?=
the subject line is not encoded properly (see RFC2047), please file a bug against the application that the sender uses. there's nothing that evolution can do here (yes, we had this discussion already several times ;-) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 496390 ***
When you are the only one to think you are right, maybe that's because you're wrong :) Seriously, there are many broken mailers (some are proprietary products), and the situation hasn't gotten better since. Evo already has workarounds e.g. to recognize Windows charsets masquerading as iso-latin. For those title encodings, it's the only mailer I tried which fails at displaying them properly; it should relax a bit its constraints (but continue to be strict in what it sends). I still think it's a bug, and it should be reopened. Seeing these broken subject lines is a pain in the neck.
From what I understand of RFC2047 the problem is only with embedded spaces in the encoding? I have read the RFC and I have seen it is explicitly mentioned to avoid using spaces and tabs in encodings. However, I second Xavier's opinion that it would be best to be strict in the output, and lax in the parsing.
these are broken encodings, technically NOTABUG however, worked around most of these broken cases in svn
Not sure if this was committed to the official tree yet, as 2.22.1 (Ubuntu 8.04) still presents this issue - 5 months after this "closing".