Re: [tlug] Re: Hotmail mail encoding

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

Stuart Luppescu writes:

 > message from hotmail, and, mirabile dictu, gmail displays it correctly,

gmail appears to be brownnosing the unwashed apes.

 > but evolution just shows this:
 > 
 > これは試験です。
 > 読めますか。

That is correct given the headers you post for that message.  That is
perfectly valid text/plain as is; no decoding is requested, and all
characters are ASCII so no error will be signaled.  Of course, it's
gibberish to humans, but that is not your MUA's fault, it is being
*lied* to.  What appears to be happening is that Hotmail is assuming
that the remote end will treat the message as HTML no matter what the
headers say.

I suspect that you can read the message in Gmail because Gmail embeds
it in an HTML element before sending it (but without escaping the
entities, which is arguably broken).  (Or maybe your browser
implicitly does so.)  Evolution doesn't read it because it's an
approximation to a conforming MUA, but has no inherent bias toward
displaying things as HTML to cover up for Hotmail's total bogosity.

 > Could the fact that I set my default encoding in Firefox to UTF-8 be
 > related to this?

Yes, but "how" is a good question.  Hotmail is clearly incredibly
broken, but webmail is such a complex application it's hard to guess
exactly where the breakage is occurring.