Re: [hylafax-users] Fax confirmation: Umlauts broken

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Konrad Baechler wrote:

> Below two example extracts of valid SMTP headers containing Umlaute. 
> That's the way your SMTP headers should look like to be compliant with 
> the specific RFC's.
>
> [...]
> Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:00:00 +0100
> Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6ffentliches_Kaufangebot_f=FCr_die_Bank_Linth?=
> MIME-Version: 1.0 


I do not disagree with the correctness of your statement here.  However, 
encoding the Subject header should not be necessary in most ISO-8859-1 
cases.  The mail reader whose default character set is ISO-8859-1 should 
be able to display 8-bit German umlauted characters just fine without 
being RFC 2047-encoded.

Mail readers should be programmed such that they interpret unencoded 
Subject headers using either the default character set or ISO-8859-1.  
Any Subject header using a character set other than ISO-8859-1 should, 
indeed, be RFC 2047-encoded.  But that's not the case here.

Granted, the omission of the RFC 2047-encoding in this case could 
possibly result in difficulty when the mail reader's default character 
set is not ISO-8859-1.  And thus encoding all Subject headers would be, 
perhaps, the most RFC-compliant thing to do.  However, I'm not sure that 
is a perfect real-world solution, either.

Interesting, however, is that the "receiver" data that Max is describing 
is coming from the remote fax machine - and that fax machine doesn't 
encode the data, and there is no sure-fire way to know what character 
set the receiver data should be displayed in.  Suppose that I sent a fax 
to someone in Poland and that their "receiver" data used the ISO-8859-2 
character set.  Even if the Subject line of the email were encoded 
according to RFC 2047 for ISO-8859-1 it would still be wrong for the 
"receiver" data which would need to be specially handled with 
ISO-8859-2... and the remote fax machine does not (as far as I know) 
present us with the kind of information to make that distinction.  So in 
that kind of situation it would still be displayed incorrectly... and 
there would be very little that we could do about it... and in the end 
it may just be best to leave that part up to the mail reader and its own 
default character set.

Lee.


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