GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 337394
Evolution should respect my choice to send e-mail in UTF-8
Last modified: 2006-07-03 01:02:33 UTC
Please describe the problem: If the message is purely ASCII, Evolution sent it without specifying an encoding (Content-Type: text/plain, without charset=something). This causes interoperability problem with Outlook Express. When the recipient replies with non-ASCII characters, some versions of OE will send the message right the way, claiming it as iso-8859-1 but in fact in native encoding. Yes, this is OE bug, but many people are using it. In fact, if I did send the mail with charset=utf-8, then this bug will not be triggered. As discussed in a similar bug in Mozilla Thunderbird (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247958), RFC2046 states that we SHOULD downgrade the charset to the lowest common denominator. However, time has changed, and now that most mailers do support UTF-8. Sending every mail in UTF-8 no longer cause the plenty of problems as in 1996 when the RFC was endorsed. Finally this got fixed in Thunderbird after lengthy discussions, where the default is changed to respect the user's setting, and an option is provided for the old behavior. I understand that some people may still prefer sending their mails using the lowest common denominator encoding. But there are also people like me, who prefer sending every of my mails in UTF-8. Hence I think at least I should have an option to do so in Evolution. As a summary, this bug should be fixed because: * It does not respect my choice * It causes interoperability problem with OE * RFC2046 says otherwise, but the recommendation is probably outdated * Sending in UTF-8 tells the receipient that I prefer this encoding. Steps to reproduce: 1. Compose an e-mail 2. Type only ASCII characters 3. Choose UTF-8 as character encoding. 4. Send Actual results: The mail is sent with Content-Type: text/plain Expected results: The mail is sent with Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Does this happen every time? Sure Other information:
you'd be wrong about sending mail tagged as UTF-8 not breaking other mailers... in fact we have quite a few bug reports (usually from users using Asian charsets) where Evolution sent email in UTF-8 and the recipient's mailer cannot handle it. So sending as UTF-8 instead of ASCII is a HUGE no-no. There's no interoperability problem with sending as US-ASCII, the bug is in OE's reply code, not it's receive code.
Is it possible to at least provide me with such an option? I also live in Asia, but I have not got any problem with sending all mails in UTF-8 for around 1.5 years.
Note that I also talked talked about respecting my choice. If I know the receipint doesn't like UTF-8, I wouldn't have chosen to send in this encoding. If I choose so, then I want it to be.
No one seem to care about answering my question unless I reopen the bug report.
well, there is a clear explanation - jeffrey explained this issue and why it will not be changed.