Re: [Evolution] Character encoding specified in Content-Type field of outgoing messages

[Alex Viskovatoff <member viskov fastmail fm>]

On Sat, 2003-04-05 at 20:49, guenther wrote: 
> I just tested it and it seems, that Evo guesses what charset to use --
> taking the smallest matching to avoid conflicts with not 8859-15 capable
> mailers.
> (Developers: Slap me, if I am wrong here.)
>
> test mail / plain text:      Content-Type: text/plain
> test mail / 'äöü €' string:  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15
>
> 8859-15 is my preferred charset. Works for me...

Hi Guenther,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, when I pasted your test string 'äöü €' into
an outgoing message, it worked for me, too.

What I had been doing is pasting some text containing a Euro symbol from
a stored message, described as being of charset=ISO-8859-1 in the
Content-Type header of that message into the message I was composing. If
before I do the copy and paste, I change the window showing the stored
message to display as ISO-8859-15, the message I compose gets sent out
as ISO-8859-15. However, if I leave the window with the stored message I
am copying text from so that it displays text using ISO-8859-1, the
message I compose with the pasted text gets sent out as ISO-8859-1, even
though in the "character encoding" menu item in the message composition
window, ISO-8859-15 is selected. Needless to say, this undocumented
feature is highly counterintuitive.

Why can't Evolution simply send out messages specifying that charset in
the message header which the user selects in the Character Encoding
menu? Why should Evolution's designers concern themselves with
non-8859-15 capable mailers? (Is this some kind of American plot to keep
the Euro from becoming an international reserve currency to compete with
the dollar? ;))

Evolution's second-guessing the user as to which character set to use
becomes more problematic under the following scenario. I need to send
messages in Russian only occasionally, so that I have not gone through
the trouble of configuring X-Window to allow me to type in Cyrillic. But
I can type in Cyrillic in Emacs. If Evolution behaved as one has reason
to expect it to - namely, that when on selects a particular character
encoding when composing a message, that encoding will be specified in
the header of the email that is sent out - then I could simply use Emacs
to compose my message using a Cyrillic encoding, use the Evolution's
"Insert text file" feature to insert that text into my message, and then
specify to Evolution that the message is to be described as containing
text of the appropriate Cyrillic encoding. As Evolution stands now, I
cannot do this, and hence I cannot send out a (MIME-) syntactically
correct message in Russian.

I suggest that instead of trying to second-guess the user, Evolution
simply specify in the Content-Type field of outgoing messages the
character encoding selected by the user.

All of which is not to say that Evolution is not the nicest email client
I have used under any OS: Unix, OS/2, Windows, or Mac!

Alex