[imp] UTF issue(cvs head).urgent

Michael M Slusarz slusarz at bigworm.colorado.edu
Wed Nov 26 14:26:04 PST 2003


Quoting David Chang <david at tmv.gov.tw>:

| Is it possible to let IMP use the default language/charset setting in
| NLS.php to display sort of mail ?

No - messages that do not have the charset parameter can NOT default to a
local language/charset setting.  It is absolutely plain in RFC 2046 [4.1.2]
that it must be this way:

  The default character set, which must be assumed in the absence of a
  charset parameter, is US-ASCII.

Thus US-ASCII will always be used as the default charset if a MIME part does
not say otherwise.

| Because my whole site user complain to me about this issue. I think most
| of Taiwan,Chinese users (100000000 peoples)will have such problem if they
| chose IMP 4.0 in the future.

NO - this is a completely incorrect statement.  The problem with the message
you forwarded to the list is that it does NOT contain charset data and
thus, it MUST be shown in US-ASCII.  It has nothing to do with not
supporting the Chinese/Big-5 characterset. Of course IMP will show "big5"
characters if that is the character set identified by the MIME part.  The
problem in the current situation is that the message received by you was
sent by a horribly buggy mailer.  There is nothing IMP can do to fix that
(and, in my personal experience, 99.9% of malformed MIME messages are SPAM
anyway - a good MUA will not send bad MIME messages - so why are you
complaining?).

michael

______________________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at bigworm.colorado.edu]
The University of Colorado at Boulder


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