Re: [tlug] Selective mojibake email

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Glenn" == Glenn Evanish <glenn@example.com> writes:

    Glenn> Both say charset=ISO-8859-1 but they're displayed
    Glenn> differently, even though both browsers are set to
    Glenn> Shift-JIS.

Well, sheesh, if you're going to lie about the contents, you really
can't expect a conforming receiver to do anything sane!  I thought you
said you saw nothing weird about the headers?  Brother, I suggest you
get yourself a copy of the Unicode standard (drafts are available at
www.unicode.org IIRC), ISO 2022 (you can get it cheaply from ECMA as
ECMA-35 at ecma.ch, they've been futzing with their server virtual
hosting so I don't know the exact URL offhand), and the MIME RFCs
(2045-2049 for starters), and do some studying.  (Or maybe you already
know all this stuff and are just short of sleep? :)

According to the headers you posted, both browsers and server are
broken.  The User-Agent, IMP/PHP IMAP webmail program 2.2.7, is
presumably just assuming that anything with high bit set is Latin-1
(so don't go discussing the price of French wine).  Blarg.  Maybe that
can be configured, eg to Shit JIS, but then you'll have Win2k users
sending UTF-16, and maybe somebody really does want to discuss the
price of French wine in French using ISO 8859/15?

And as we see here, Microsoft's mail software historically ignores the
Content-Type header on receipt and does autodetection based on locale
(which is very reliable as long as the user is monolingual, or maybe
bilingual in something and English, which is an especially good
assumption for Japanese Windows users) and expects the user to
configure it for outgoing mail.  (I've seen "Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=koi8-r" with Shift-JIS content.  I was told that does not
cause problems for recipients using Windows.)

This looks like a big mess to me....

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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