[arachne] Re: 8 bit encoding in e-mail headers

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Hi Bastiaan, Hi all,

On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 14:08:41 +00, Bastiaan Edelman, PA3FFZ wrote:

> We had some discussion about this subject some time (2 years?) ago.
> It seems a problem with Windoze code page iso-8859 to be not compatible
> with Arachne.

First, there is nothing like 'Windoze code page iso-8859'. Windows
codepages are 'windows-1250', 'windows-1251', etc. All 'iso-8859-*'
codepages (in contrary to 'windows-*') are official international
standards and do not originate at Microsoft.

> I used two 8-bit caracters, é and č, in the subject line with no problems
> in Arachne or with Win-clients.
> But if Helene sends me an e-mail and she uses Windoze Outlook than this
> =?iso-8859-2... carbage is in the from line.

This is not garbage. This is how message headers _must_ be
formatted when they contain 8-bit characters, as defined by RFC2047.
By putting 8-bit characters directly into the headers, Arachne/Insight
_breaks_ the rules. Just because Arachne/Insight itself and other
e-mail clients try to interprete these headers, and that they
fortunately pass unmodified through the network, it does not mean that
they are correct.

> To me this is not a problem with Arachne but a Windoze problem... M$ is
> using its own interpretation of the "standard" iso-8859.

This may sound cruel, but: OUTLOOK DOES IT THE RIGHT WAY.

> Especially if
> Word-documents are used or if Word is used to compose an e-mail.

This afects only the message body encoding, I guess.

Having explained some details, let us look for '?Q' or '?Q' in
INSIGHT\*.C. In INSIGHT.C, there is a function 'readheader' which
seems to call 'analyzequotedrow' only for the 'Subject:' line;
'analyzequotedrow' itself does not seem to be fully compliant with
RFC2047, either. At least as far as I can understand C without
compiling it and looking at the resulting machine code. <G G G>

Greetings,

Michal


Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --

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