Jeff Breidenbach writes: > I've seen a small but not tiny number of messages where the > Mail User Agent is sticking raw iso-8859-1 characters (outside > the ASCII range) inside the Subject: header.
It's invalid, but it's not uncommon. It's getting rarer, though, as more an more legacy mail user agents end up on the scrap heap. One puzzling thing I've seen, though, is that it's quite common for Chinese-language and Russian-language to put unencoded characters (big-5 and koi8, respectively) in the Subject header. I haven't really looked into the causes why, but I've had to add support for default charset handling into Gmane to make certain lists at all legible. That is, when doing the conversion to utf-8, I have a per-list charset list to be used, which I feed to the converter. An alternative approach is to use charset-guessing software (which is supposed to be pretty good, these days), or look for clues in the rest of the message for what the charset most likely is -- there may be a Content-Type with a charset parameter, even though the headers aren't RFC2047 encoded. Etc. Or you can just ignore the problem with these invalid email messages. :-) -- (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen _______________________________________________ Discussion list for The Mail Archive Gossip@jab.org http://jab.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
