[kmail2] [Bug 469713] New: Substitution of one's own address leads to grammar garbage in German

[Georg Schwarz]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469713

            Bug ID: 469713
           Summary: Substitution of one's own address leads to grammar
                    garbage in German
    Classification: Applications
           Product: kmail2
           Version: 5.22.2
          Platform: Other
                OS: Other
            Status: REPORTED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: UI
          Assignee: kdepim-bugs at kde.org
          Reporter: georg.schwarz at freenet.de
  Target Milestone: ---

SUMMARY

When displaying an email, kmail2 substitutes the user's own address/identity in
To and From lines in the header pane.
At least in German, this results in grammatical garbage.


STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1.  Use kmail2 with the UI language set to German (e.g. on a system with system
language German)
2.  Open an Email which has been sent to or by the user.

OBSERVED RESULT

The user's identity is displayed as "Von: Ich" or "An: Ich" in the header
pane's From or To lines.


EXPECTED RESULT

Grammatically correct it should read "Von: mir" and "An: mich" ("From: me" and
"To: me").

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS

probably any

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The issue is brought about be the fact that the two repositions "von" ("from")
and "an" ("to") in German require different cases of the personal pronoun,
which in the first person singular have different forms (unlike in English).
"ich" (which unlike in English should not be capitalized), i.e. Nominative, is
am utterly incorrect choice for both cases.

I had a look at the code and it seems there are no provisions for
distinguishing between the different cases, i.e. different header lines. In
both cases the substitution is deeply buried in
StringUtil::emailAddrAsAnchor(). (Looking at
https://api.kde.org/legacy/3.5-api/kdepim-apidocs/kmail/html/kmmessage_8cpp_source.html#l03768)
(not sure it that's the current code or whether this specific one is from an
outdated version; in any case there still should be comparable code with the
current release which performs the substitution).

Unfortunately this seems to be a case of specific cultural/linguistic
structures not being sufficiently considered in the code.
I am wondering whether further languages such as e.g. Russian are also affected
by this phenomenon.

My sincere suggestion is to add an option to switch off that substitution of
one's displayed email address/identify altogether. For the sake of transparency
I would appreciate such an option in any language anyway.
Unfortunately it looks like that substitution is quite deeply buried in the
code so it is maybe not obvious where the best location would be for that
setting.

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