[Evolution] Evo 1.4.x: Problems with German umlauts (e.g., bug #47646)

[Mario Vukelic <mario vukelic dantian org>]

Hi, 

since switching to Evo 1.4.0 (currently I use 1.4.4) I've been
experiencing strange problems with German umlauts [ÃÃÃ] and "sz" [Ã] (I
hope you seem them correctly in this mail).

I have the same problem on a machine with Debian Sid, and on a machine
Debian Woody + Gnome 2.2 backports (this machine also has Evo 1.4.4 from
Garnome installed, with same problem).
Mail is received by fetchmail from my ISP, and stored in courier-imap on
the Woody machine, which both machines use. Sending is via postfix.
I always had my character encoding set to ISO-8859-15, as I had in Evo
1.2.x. The mail setup did not change when I switched from Evo 1.2.x to
1.4.0. 
However, suddenly the behavior is, at least from my POV, very erratic:

Often when I compose a message, it displays ok, but after clicking
"Send", the characters are garbled in my sent folder.
Other messages are stored ok in my sent folder.
Also, messages I send out are sometimes ok, sometimes not; and the same
applies to messages I receive.

This has never happened to me in 1.2.x

Because of some clues I've come to suspect that the message length has
something to do with it, and so I made a little test: I composed 1 short
(12 characters) and 1 very long message (several hundred chars) with
only (!) the offending characters, once encoded in UTF-8 and once in
ISO-8859-15, and sent them to me via my ISP.

*** Result:

** All 4 messages have the correct charset set in courier-imap's Maildir

** Encoding set to UTF-8:
* Sent folder: Both the short and the long message are displayed ok 
* Inbox: As in Sent folder 

** Encoding set to ISO-8859-15:
* Sent folder; The short message is displayed ok; the long message is
displayed garbled
* Inbox: As in Sent folder

I then tried to find out if there's a fixed limit to what gets displayed
ok, but only partly succeded before I was bored :)
I constructed a message with 40 offending charactters per line, and
repeated the line until it was displayed garbled (keep in mind, the
actual composing of the message always displayed the characters ok)

** Encoding set to ISO-8859-15:
* Sent folder: with 80 lines and 4 additional chars it displayed ok;
with 5 additional chars everything is garbled
* Inbox: with 36 lines ok, with 72 garbled

This was the point where I became bored. Hopefully someone can make
something of this. I am of course willing to test further if it helps.

Is there any advice for what to do until this is fixed? Evo 1.4.x is
quite unusable for me for German mails with this problem. Is it save to
set the default encoding to UTF-8 in Settings?

Kind regards, Mario