Re: National characters and Hotmail

[Albrecht Dreß <albrecht dress arcor de>]

Am 29.06.04 20:04 schrieb(en) Kent Asplund:
> When somebody sends me a mail using his Hotmail-account it shows up in  
> balsa with all national characters replaced with '?'.

This is a commen problem with web mailers, some automatic mail generators  
and similar stuff - they simply violate RFC 2045 and friends...

> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
[snip]
> I notice that "Content-Type" is missing a "charset" description. Should
> not Balsa then use default charset or is this implying us-ascii?

IIRC, no charset parameter does indeed mean us-ascii. Please note that if  
the message contains 8-bit chars, it should also have a proper content- 
transfer-encoding (i.e. quoted-printable). 8bit is dangerous as it is not  
guaranteed that MTA's passes them unmodified.

> I had the same problem in Mutt and added:
> "charset-hook ascii iso-8859-1" in my .muttrc to solve it.

Hmmm, this is exactly what the setting in the prefs (convert to western  
european should be the correct setting for you) should do... It works  
perfectly for me with e.g. 8-bit messages coming from pine, even if they  
explicitly state

Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

(actually, these are gpg encrypted messages, and pine does determine the  
charset needed *after* the gpg encrypted, armored content has been  
created; of course, it's always 7-bit us-ascii...).

I'm somewhat confused why it doesn't work. If the message is not private  
or confidential, can you forward it to me as attachment? Maybe hotmail  
uses a strange encoding scheme?

> Am I sending to the right forum?

Yes and no. You may want to complain at hotmail that their mailer violates  
rfc 2045 ff. But Balsa *has* this feature, so if that doesn't work for  
you, we must find out why...

> Is this also where I suggest improvements?

YES!! Everything is welcome :-))

Cheers,
	Albrecht.


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