[bugs] [Bug 1052] Changed - multilingual support in IMP is broken/misdesigned

[bugs at bugs.horde.org]

http://bugs.horde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1052

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--- shadow/1052.tmp.19774	Wed Feb 12 11:45:40 2003
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*** 337,339 ****
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  I hope that made you curious to try out the latest and greatest version of Horde
  and IMP.
+ 
+ ------- Additional Comments From jshin at jtan.com  02/12/03 11:45 -------
+ Jan,
+ Thank you for your detailed comment on my patch.
+ It's great that IMP has been greatly improved in terms of
+ I18N since the last time
+ I checked and I made my patch, which was last September. 
+ 
+ > the assumed charset will be
+ > used on messages that don't have a charset header. This might be
+  > interesting to
+ > Michael, our MIME guru. ;-)
+ 
+  |assumed_charset| is used not only for rendering the body
+ of emails without 'charset' parameter in C-T header
+ but also used for rendering the message headers which
+ are NOT compliant to RFC 2047. RFC 2047 specifies that 
+ non-7bit characters be represented as
+ 
+  =?Charset?(B|Q)?.........?=
+ 
+ However, in reality, a lot of emails don't
+ abide by the rule. Because a single user
+ usually gets emails in a single encoding(e.g.
+ ISO-8859-1/15 for Western Europeans, ISO-2022-JP
+ for Japanese, GB2312 for Simpl. Chinese), (s)he
+ can set it to that particular encoding. 
+ 
+ > How do you build the list of possible charsets? Do you have such
+ > a list somewhere? Do you use the available charsets fro nls.php > (lang.php in
+ > your Horde version)?
+ 
+   Yes, I forgot to include my modified version of lang.php (now
+ nls.php) to which I added an assoisative array. It's
+ now available at http://jshin.net/i18n/lang.php
+ 
+ > Currently we send all email out with the UTF-8 charset, 
+ > if the admin enable UTF support at all.
+ 
+   This is too futuristic. Needless to say, this is the
+ way to go and I'm a big fan of UTF-8. However, the world
+ at large is not yet there (especially stupid web mail
+ services like hotmal, yahoo mail, lycos mail don't work
+ well with UTF-8). Therefore, we should let users
+ have a final say in what encoding/MIME charset to use
+ ,by default (overidable at the time of composition
+ as is the case in Mozilla-Mail and MS OE),  for outgoing
+ messages. That's what my patch did(although 
+ it's not overidable at the time of composition).
+ 
+ 
+ >  Or should we even allow the users to enter 
+ > freely a charset in an input field (I don't think so)?
+ 
+   I agree that this should not be done. We can get
+ a list of MIME charsets (to allow) from applications
+ like Mozilla. 
+ 
+ As for iconv and mbstring, my patch also relies on iconv. I didn't
+ use mbstring, though. it appeard to me that  php's multibyte string handling
+ (the last time I took a look) was a bit flaky.
+ I'm glad to know that you and other developers realized the
+ weakness and came up with your own for horde. 
+ 
+ Incidentally, I've been trying to access the demo page
+ of imp at both horde.org and hubs.org, but the URL
+ for the former is invalid and I couldn't go beyond
+ the login screen at hubs.org. Perhaps, I have to
+ install the latest version on my machine to test. 
+ 
+ Thanks again for your detailed comment and explanation.
+  
+ 
+ 
+