[kdepim-users] Re: KMail and characters sets (=20 problem)

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Tuesday 15 March 2011, Peter wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 March 2011 08:29:22 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > On Monday 14 March 2011, Peter wrote:
> > > Some emails being sent from KMail refuse to use the char set
> > > defined.
> > > 
> > > Some lines end in = , and then the next line starts in =20
> > > and there are a whole lot of lines with "=20" in them.
> > > 
[snip]
> > > 
> > > What characters will make the email contain garbage ? Like wjat
> > > about quotes, single quotes, underlines, dashes, double equal
> > > signs, etc, etc ??
> >
> > Your questions should have been answered by Thomas on the kde-pim
> > mailing list. I strongly support Thomas recommendation not to worry
> > about the encoding. Let KMail choose a suitable encoding for your
> > messages.
> 
> I never received the reply from Thomas, however I can see it in the
> archives. I was looking at the raw format, because I needed to copy
> the raw data to another computer, and the 'save as' exported all the
> garbage, not what I wanted. I wanted just the clear plain text.
> 
> I see Thomas said:
> > You should really not worry about encoding issues, using non-ASCII
> > characters is understood by virtually every mail client today, MIME
> > encodings like qouted-printable have been around for more than a
> > decade.
> 
> Okay, my concern was continuing along the lines of what i saw in the
> 'save as', and didn't want that sort of 'garbage' being 'seen' by
> the recipients. However, if you are 100% certain that people will
> not see it, but only see the plain text (non-html anyway), then that
> is okay.

I'm 99% certain. There will always be people using totally crappy mail 
clients (web mail clients come to mind, or primitive mail clients on 
mobiles) that will see the encoded characters. But everybody else will 
see your messages correctly. Even people using a mail client from 
Microsoft. :-)


> Couldn't understand why KMail , on the auto-detect would go utf-8
> anyway, as I looked down the 'us-ascii' chart on one site, and all
> the characters I used in the email were specified in that chart.
> Simply meaning, allthe chars in the email were of the us-ascii , so
> why would KMail go ..
> 
>    charset="utf-8"
>  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
> 
> .. beats me.

Without having a look at a specific message I cannot explain it. I would 
have to check the source code to see under which conditions KMail 
chooses an encoding different from us-ascii.


> Anyway, I will leave it on 'auto etect' as it has been
> 
> Under Composer, Charset TAB, the order is
> 
> iso-8859-1
> us-ascii
> utf-8 (locale)
> utf-8
> 
> but I guess 'auto detect' overrides that.

No, it does not override that. In fact, 'auto detect' tries those 
charsets from top to bottom to find a suitable charset. BTW, you might 
want to move us-ascii before iso-8859-1. Otherwise, us-ascii will never 
be used (because iso-8859-1 is a superset of us-ascii).


> One area that did give me
> concern though, is when KMail was 'forced' to (say) us-ascii, a msg
> appears like 'chars will be lost', I press okay amd send, but email
> seems okay. However, if I wait a few more seconds, the email in
> composer mode turns out complete rubbish, all formatting is lost,
> many characetsr have been changed, etc.
> 
> So, what I'm saying is, if I do use "force" the encoding, I have to
> send it within a few seconds, otherwise the whole email is
> clobbered, but at least the 'edit undo' is there.

Hmm. Obviously, this should not happen. Please submit a bug report via 
Help->Report Bug.


> Bottom line is, if people are 100% certain that the recipients will
> not see the encoding (in raw format, it is impossible to read, well
> almost), then I will simply let KMail auto detect.

See above. I definitely recommend using 'auto detect'.


> I wonder what this will be sent as, there are no special chars, so
> us-ascii should be okay.

Actually, there is at least one special character in your message. In my 
last name which was included in your reply in the "On ... wrote" line. 
:-)


Regards,
Ingo
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