GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 338550
Evolution encodes greek Subject: as 8859-7, though configured UTF-8
Last modified: 2006-04-18 17:35:49 UTC
You can configure Evolution to send e-mails in the UTF-8 encoding. which works well. However, the Subject: line does not appear to respect the UTF-8 setting and it encodes the Greek subject line in the ISO-8859-7 encoding. The encoding is correct, but's it's not what we asked for. I would expect that UTF-8 would be used to encode the Subject: line. This issue triggers a bug in GMail, as it appears GMail ignores the message encoding if the Subject: encoding is set. The fact that GMail is affected is of little importance here (it will reported there anyway). The important issue is, why does Evolution encode the subject line in ISO-8859-7 though there is no reference in the configuration to do so. Does this issue exist in other languages? A. How to reproduce a. It is irrespective of your locale (I use now en_US.UTF-8) b. Configure Evolution to send e-mail as UTF-8 Edit/Preferences/Composer/Encoding: UTF-8 c. Compose an e-mail and send to yourself/etc Add as a subject line some text in Greek, such as Αυτή είναι μια δοκιμή (this is a test). d. Add the same text in the message body. e. Send the mail f. You may check the received e-mail or just look in the Sent items. The headers look like ======== Subject: =?iso-8859-7?Q?=C4=EF=EA=E9=EC=DE?= From: Simos Xenitellis To: Simos Xenitellis Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:58:26 +0100 Message-Id: <1145059106.12128.0.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.4.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Δοκιμή στα ελληνικά ======== The proper would be to encode the Subject in the UTF-8 encoding, as this is the encoding we specified in the preferences. That is, the Subject: should look like Subject: =?utf-8?Q?=...........
same problem with Evolution 2.6.0 (2.6.0-1) (fc5) Subject: =?iso-8859-7?Q?=E1=F5=F4=FC?= =?iso-8859-7?Q?_=E5=DF=ED=E1=E9?= =?iso-8859-7?Q?_=EC=E9=E1?= =?iso-8859-7?Q?_=E4=EF=EA=E9=EC=DE?= From: Nikos Charonitakis <charosn@her.forthnet.gr> To: nikosx@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 16:56:09 +0300 Message-Id: <1145109369.2710.1.camel@helios> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.6.0 (2.6.0-1) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit αυτό είναι το κείμενο της δοκιμής
a bit related to bug 224026, i guess
kind of, but actually asking for the opposite effect :) The preferences charset is only applied to message content, not headers. This is done for a reason: Header values have their header charsets "downgraded" to the lowest common denominator (as described by the MIME rfcs) because there are many users out there still using older mail clients which do not yet support encodings such as UTF-8 (see bug #224026 for a user complaining about this very thing) - downgrading allow these older mailers to display a non-garbled message-list to the user. I, personally, would love to drop all this annoying charset bullcrud and just always deal in UTF-8, it would make my life much more pleasant (as well as user's lives), but sadly I cannot without getting brutally flamed by other users who want their friends/business associates to be able to read their mail.
is it possible for user to have a choice? example: user nikos :) would like to send message headers encoded in UTF-8 instead of the default behaviour. is it possible? I think it is.
why do you care?