Re: [tlug] Selective mojibake email

["Glenn Evanish" <glenn@example.com>]

>     Glenn> Both say charset=ISO-8859-1 but they're displayed
>     Glenn> differently, even though both browsers are set to
>     Glenn> Shift-JIS.
>
> Well, sheesh, if you're going to lie about the contents, you really
> can't expect a conforming receiver to do anything sane!  I thought you
> said you saw nothing weird about the headers?

I didn't have the requiste knowledge to accurately judge whether the headers
were "wierd" or not.  What I did say, or meant to say, was that since the
only difference in the headers was the email addresses, there didn't seem to
be anything there that would explain why the same message displayed
correctly on one machine and displayed mojibake on the other.  Am I wrong on
this?

Brother, I suggest you
> get yourself a copy of the Unicode standard (drafts are available at
> www.unicode.org IIRC), ISO 2022 (you can get it cheaply from ECMA as
> ECMA-35 at ecma.ch, they've been futzing with their server virtual
> hosting so I don't know the exact URL offhand), and the MIME RFCs
> (2045-2049 for starters), and do some studying.  (Or maybe you already
> know all this stuff and are just short of sleep? :)

Actually it's more like I'm already short of sleep, Turnbull-san, and that's
why I don't know this stuff. :-)

I'm not a UNIX professional or even an IT professional, so I am not a
character set expert, nor am I sure that it's necessary/possible for me to
become one at this stage on limited free time.  Sorry.  I couldn't get to
the computer at all Friday, so it wasn't until today that I saw that my post
has taken on a Microsoft-bashing/defending life of its own.  Can I bring it
back to the original question for a minute?

It seems what you are saying, is that the Win98-J laptop and IE5 should be
sending Japnese email in charset=ISO 2022, but since I was logged in to the
Horde IMAP in English mode, or because the IMP couldn't naturally couldn't
know what to do with ISO 2022,  this was stored on the server as ISO-8859-1.
Then the laptop read the email off the IMAP server, cavalierly ignoring the
header information and parsing the content for character set clues.  It then
displayed the content in Japanese "correctly," even though this was not the
instruction in the header.

All other more modern OS/browser combinations dutifully displayed the
messages in charset=ISO-8859-1, which naturally comes out as mojibake since
that character set includes no kanji whatsoever.

The moral of the story is that if I want the Horde IMP to display kanji
correctly on anything other that that Y5,000 laptop, I'm going to have to
have the Japanese locale installed on the Mitel's SME server.  Or not?  Just
the emailer?

As Tobias said,

>So he may just have to modify the webmailer to have
>its pages in utf-8 and interpret the posted form data in utf-8 and
>convert to iso-2022-jp if all characters have a representation in that
>one.

This looks promising.  I might be able to figure out how to do that from
reading the emailer config files.

Am I getting closer on this?

Glenn