Re: [gmime-devel] Encoding headers: Is UTF-8 a sane default now?

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj gnome org>]

Hi Michael,

I suspect that by now UTF-8 is far better supported than it was in 2007 
(and GMime's charset logic is really older than 2007) and it may make 
sense to drop encoding at least *some* of the older header encodings in 
favor of just using UTF-8. It might even be safe to always encode in 
UTF-8, but I'm not entirely sure on that one.

Your user probably makes a good point at least as far as ISO-8859-* 
charsets go these days.

From a quick look at charset-map.c, I have a feeling that we can 
probably drop all of the iso charsets except possibly 5 and 15.

If your friend says that iso-8859-7 isn't commonly used anymore, then it 
sounds like we can at least safely drop that one.

I wish there was a good way of figuring out which charsets are still in 
common use and widely supported (at least as far as decoding is concerned).

Jeff

On 6/29/2016 9:59 AM, Michael Gratton wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Looking back through GMime bugs in b.g.o, it seems that in 2007 anyway 
> using UTF-8 as a default encoding for headers was a bad idea. Is this 
> still the case? I ask because a user has reported a Geary bug[0] that 
> suggest for Greek at least ISO8859 is deprecated these days in favour 
> of UTF-8, and indeed one mailer (Rainloop) seems to have problems with 
> the older encoding.
>
> I can have Geary init GMime to default to UTF-8 for encoding non-ASCII 
> headers, but is that a good idea today?
>
> //Mike
>
> [0] - <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=753870>