[kdepim-users] Still having encoding problems

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Saturday 14 February 2009, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 11 February 2009 22:52:11 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > On Wednesday 11 February 2009, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 11 February 2009 20:33:54 phep wrote:
> > > > Anne Wilson a écrit :
> > > > > I'm flabbergasted!  So an English company sends out English
> > > > > email to English customers, using an encoding that will make
> > > > > no sense to them?
> > > > >
> > > > > KMail didn't get it wrong - the headers say
> > > > > charset="iso-8859-1". I guess they've just got a new Windows
> > > > > install :-)
> > > >
> > > > Sorry, I made a copy/paste error in my previous message : I
> > > > meant "ISO-8859-1 displayed as ISO-8859-15".
> > > >
> > > > According to what you observed, it's KMail's fault as I
> > > > considered previously. ISO-8859-15 is mainly used for it
> > > > introduced the € (Euro) character in ISO-8859 tables. I
> > > > understand that this may not be what an English company might
> > > > wish to use ;-).
> > > >
> > > > Sorry for the confusion.
> > >
> > > Unless I'm much mistaken, 8859-15 is actually mostly used in
> > > British English mail.  The € is present, but so is the £, so
> > > that's no problem.  I'm guessing that it is a new setup and they
> > > haven't realised that they have a different charset.  I've
> > > emailed them and gently pointed it out :-)
> > >
> > > Meanwhile, if you are saying that kmail displayed it as 8859-15,
> > > I guess I should file a bug.
> >
> > I'm pretty sure KMail only does what it is told to do. If the
> > message advertises the charset as ISO-8859-1 (latin1) then KMail
> > uses this charset for decoding/displaying. If the message
> > advertises the charset as ISO-8859-15 (latin9; don't you love the
> > consistent numbering schemes ;-) ) then KMail uses latin9.
>
> The headers say it is 8859-1
>
> > ...unless the user forces KMail to do something else, e.g. by
> > setting an override character encoding.
>
> KMail is set to Auto
>
> > It'd be great if you could forward such a message to me.
>
> On its way :-)

The message is a multipart/alternative message with plain text part and 
HTML part. The interesting lines of the message are:

[...]
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
  boundary="=_NextPart_2emsgsadvnqw3nerasdf";
  charset="iso-8859-1"
[...]
--=_NextPart_2emsgsadvnqw3nerasdf
Content-Type: text/plain
[...]
--=_NextPart_2emsgsadvnqw3nerasdf
Content-Type: text/html
[...]

So the charset is specified for the enclosing multipart/alternative body 
part, but no charset is specified for the enclosed text/plain body part 
or the enclosed text/html body part. Therefore KMail uses the fallback 
encoding for the text in the text/plain body part and the text/html 
body part. Anne told me that she had set the fallback encoding to 
ISO-8859-15. This explains Anne's observation.

A message with correctly specified charset would look as follows:

[...]
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
  boundary="=_NextPart_2emsgsadvnqw3nerasdf"
[...]
--=_NextPart_2emsgsadvnqw3nerasdf
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
[...]
--=_NextPart_2emsgsadvnqw3nerasdf
Content-Type: text/html;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
[...]


Regards,
Ingo
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