[imp] Default charset for broken mails

[Etienne Goyer]

Hi Eckl,

I have a client that experience the same exact problems.  Right now, 
they hacked the IMP source so as to convert from ISO-8859-1 to UTF8 
systematically when no charset is specified in the mail.  In their 
particuliar setting (university with a lot of foreign sydents), I think 
the cure is worst than the problem as it will screw up beyond repair the 
display of mail sent in unspecified charset other than ISO-8859-1.

A possible, if inelegant, work around for this is to set the display 
charset of your browser to ISO-8859-1 when you read mail with 
unspecified chaset.  I say inelegant as the part of the interface that 
(menu, etc) that _is_ in UTF8 would now look funny, but at least you can 
read the mail then switch back to UTF8.  From what I can see, bot IE and 
Mozilla let you change charset displayed on the fly (View -> Character 
Coding in Mozilla).

Better yet would be to serve the page in ISO-8859-1 in the first place, 
which would leave only mail in charset other than ISO-8859-1 broken.  I 
search for how to do that for a while, then gave up.  If I understand 
correctly, the charset is negociated with the client and web browsers 
seem to insist on UTF8.  If one know how to force Horde to be served in 
ISO-8859-1, I would like to hear about it.


Daniel Eckl wrote:
> Hi dear list,
> 
> does anyone know a way to set the default charset which will be used, if
> the viewed mail has broken headers?
> 
> Everyday I get mails which have wrong and strange headers like:
> 
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> or sometimes no content-type header at all.
> 
> But everytime, this was in fact Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8-bit and
> charset ISO-8859-1.
> 
> If they are included in a utf-8 page without conversion, I have the
> classical white-on-black question marks for 8-bit chars.
> 
> So my problems would be solved by having a fallback for
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8-bit and charset ISO-8859-1.
> 
> I know this is a difficult subject and also a philosophical problem of
> how error tolerant a mail client should be.
> 
> I opened such mails with kmail, too and they managed to encode them
> correctly, so there seems to be the possibility to be somewhat more
> error tolerant.
> 
> I hope there is such a possibility in IMP too...
> 
> Greets,
> Daniel

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