MIME-coding and printing problems in balsa

[Bjoern Voigt <bjoern cs tu-berlin de>]

Hello,

last time I got a mail which was sent by from Yahoo (probably using
Webmail). The mail contains german Umlauts (8 bit), but Yahoo has
marked the mail with "Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=us-ascii". It
was no problem to read the mail on screen (I use
LANG=de_DE.ISO-8859-1), but I wasn't able to print the message with
balsa. Every line with Umlauts was truncated.

I think, that Yahoo's config is wrong, but anyway, if lots of such
mailers exist (?), a mail program should work around this. An easy way
is adding a rule "us-ascii->iso-8859-1" (us-ascii is a subset of
"iso-8859-1").

I use:
- Balsa 1.2.2
- Gnome-Print 0.29
- SuSE Linux 7.3 distribution (includes Gnome 1.4.1 beta 2)
- ISO-8859-1 and cyrillic fonts for X and Ghostscript

The problem can be tested with the following short mail:
------------------------------------------------------
From local  Tue Oct 23 23:42:22 2001
Date: Tue Oct 23 23:42:22 2001
From: Some One <some-one@yahoo.com>
To: Other One <other-one@yahoo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=us-ascii
Lines: 2

Some Umlauts: äüß -- end of line
No Umlauts
------------------------------------------------------

If you print this mail (or use the preview) you see:
Some Umlauts:
No Umlauts

With "Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=iso-8859-1" it works as
expected.

I also wasn't able to read and print cyrillic mails (charset=KIO8-R).
I started balsa with LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R and tried to read the following
mail (XYZ should be cyrillic chars - I cannot use it here):
------------------------------------------------------
From local  Sat Nov  3 19:21:49 2001
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2001 19:21:49 +0100 (CET)
From: Some One <some-one@yahoo.com>
To: Other One <other-one@yahoo.com>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=KOI8-R
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Lines: 1

Some cyrillic chars: XYZ -- end of line
------------------------------------------------------

Balsa starts with russian GUI, but the mail isn't correctly displayed
and printed. Instead of the cyrillic chars I only see some boxes.

Björn Voigt

-- 
Björn Voigt <bjoern@cs.tu-berlin.de>
WWW:     http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~bjoern/