zorba-coders team mailing list archive

[David Graf <david.graf@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'm afraid I still don't understand what this encoding is doing. It sounds
> like if the subject of an email contains one non-ASCII character, that the
> entire subject line will be encoded as base-64. Is that really the intent?
> Won't that render it completely unreadable in most circumstances? I guess
> probably this is something that all/most email readers today can understand,
> but I'm afraid I've never heard of it...

Yes, exactly. If the subject contains one non-ascii character, it encodes everything. E.g. GMail has the same behavior. If I have the subject 'Zorbäääää', the raw email looks like this:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.220.62.74 with HTTP; Tue, 3 Jul 2012 04:37:27 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 13:37:27 +0200
Delivered-To: david.graf@xxxxxxxxxx
Message-ID: <CAK8y5T067pu4xA-gFw0WWeZp5G6EdUP8RfUGsTzVQFdUaRiPbw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?B?Wm9yYuTk5OTk?=
From: David Graf <david.graf@xxxxxxxxxx>
...

Some email clients use quoted printable encoding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Difference_between_Q-encoding_and_quoted-printable). In this format, the ascii chars are still readable. Or with the MIME encoded-word syntax, you can also encode just parts of the subject. But that's completely crazy. I think it doesn't matter what to do. But if we do the same then GMail, it cannot be completely wrong.

PS: As you see, encoding in emails is a little nightmare. Everything can be done in 5 different ways.
-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~davidagraf/zorba/bug-867248/+merge/113059
Your team Zorba Coders is subscribed to branch lp:zorba/email-module.