tlug: japanese subjects, Pgnus, VM?

[Mike Fabian <mike.fabian@example.com>]

I have  a question   about the  encoding of   Japanese in subjects  of
e-mails. As far  as I know,  a subject containing Japanese should look
similar to:

    Subject: =?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCPmsldkVnGyhC?=

If I  receive mails with subjects  encoded like  the above example, my
mail-user-agent (Pgnus   0.96, XEmacs   21.1)  correctly  decodes  and
displays   them.  The above example displays   as 城ヶ島. But the vast
majority of Japanese subjects  I receive  are  not encoded like  this,
they only contain the  raw iso-2022-jp code.  I can view them  only by
marking   the Subject  line and  pasting   it e.g. into  the *scratch*
buffer.  VM 6.72 also displays only  mojibake  for subjects containing
raw iso-2022-jp code.

Am I right to assume that  this problem is  not the fault of Pgnus and
VM, but rather caused by the MUAs which did send these mails?

If so, why do almost all  of them screw  up the subjects almost all of
the time?   Among the MUAs from  which I receive such  broken subjects
are:

    X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300
    X-Mailer: AOL 4.0.i for Windows 95 sub 12
    X-Mailer: AL-Mail32 Version 1.10
    X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0)
    X-Mailer: PostPet for Windows ver. 2.0 jp
    X-Mailer: Becky! ver 1.25.07
    X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [ja] (Win95; I)
    X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [ja] (Win98; I)

Is  it really so  that all these MUAs  broken when it comes to sending
Japanese subjects?

Is it possible  to setup Pgnus and/or VM  to display readable Japanese
even for such broken subjects?

In rare cases I have received correct subjects from `Mozilla 4.51 [ja]
(Win98; I)', therefore  I  suspect that there   must be an option   to
choose  correctly  encoded subjects for  most  of these MUAs, but most
people are probably not using it.

Does anybody know what sort of option  that could be? When  I was at a
friends place who uses `Mozilla 4.51 [ja]  (Win98; I)', I searched for
such an option but couldn't find anything like that.

Mike

-- 
Mike Fabian   mike.fabian@example.com   mike.fabian@example.com
Termuehlenweg 2, D-40885 Ratingen-Lintorf, Telephone: +49(0)2102/893130

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