On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > While I disapprove of the tone, I should note that Evolution is > the buggy one here, and kmail works according to specs.
Right. But is there any other mailer that works according to specs? :-) I just noticed something yesterday: Thunderbird displays incoming mail labeled iso-8859-1 as if it were windows-1252 (which is a superset of the iso encoding). Apparently this extra accommodation of potential errors is not uncommon, even outside Hebrew. What's funnier (and less excusable) about Thunderbird is that if you compose mail with characters from the windows-1252 superset and ask to send it in iso-8859-1, Thunderbird implicitly changes the header to windows-1252. This is contrary to its usual behavior, which is to prompt the user to change the character set whenever a message contains characters not in the set. Apparently the implicit header swap is special to iso-8859-1 and windows-1252: Thunderbird does prompt you if you attempt to send a message in iso-8859-2, even if it only contains characters available in windows-1252. My guess is that this implicit change of header is performed because windows-1252 is a strict superset of iso-8859-1. Yet, Thunderbird does not treat the two headers as complete synonyms: if you send a message with only iso-8859-1 characters, it will get an iso-8859-1 header. And finally something I really don't understand: out of the box, Thunderbird doesn't even offer windows-1252 as a composition option! You have to "customize" the program to get it. So if you want to compose mail with windows-1252 characters, you should select iso-8859-1 (which is the default) and let the program replace the header implicitly. Why they chose to make their program this way is quite beyond me, but I have the impression that this is deliberate. Anyway, specs shmecs, it seems that common behavior among mail clients is to be a bit more lax about what they accept than about what they send. -Ron. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
