Re: international characters in email subject line

From: Alain LaBonté  (alb@iquebec.com)
Date: Mon Feb 12 2001 - 23:50:36 EST


À 19:53 01-02-12 -0800, Sean O Seaghdha a écrit:
>Ar 12 Feb 2001, ag 15:06 scríobh Michael (michka) Kaplan
>fán ábhar "Re: international characters in ema":
>
>Of course, since my preferred mail program is Pegasus Mail, which can only be
>configured for one character set, I can't usually read such headers anyway.

[Alain] Some years ago, I was also using Pegasus mail and I was not
satisfied with this. I then communicated with the author directly (he lives
in Sourthern New Zealand); we engaged in a series of exchanges and I made
him accept to carry on the character set in use without conversion [in my
case the Windows character set]... You have to use a parameter for this,
this is the compromise he made me accept because he was really impressed by
the SMTP 7-bit-only-headers dogma -- which does not impress me since it
works any way with 8-bit-clean systems [predominant nowadays in the world
since a serious security breach, I was told, was corrected with an
8-bit-clean-enabling SMTP patch].

Now I don't remember the parameter -- which is entered at the command-line
call of Pegasus -- since I do not use this program very often any more now.

I'm using Win Eudora Pro -- which uses the system c.s. without any question
(under MacEudora it does conversions though, and illogically -- well, I
said nothing, I know some will want to kill me because they like it lie
this -- except that it does not communicate well with the rest of the
world; Win Eudora Pro is however not a model more than Mac Eudora since it
can't adapt to MIME-tagged alien c.s.).

If I were the issuer of MIME, I would invent a new header that would say
what is the implicit character set used for the headers. I hate the
MIME-tagging (whis is btw limited to 7-bit QP) inside headers themsleves --
half the time they are undecoded by many email programs, bridges of all
kinds (one daily nightmare for me is communicating with Lotus Notes, which
my employer chose for our intranet) and mail reflectors and it makes titles
very hard to read.

As I usually work in French, I have intensive experience with this.

Alain LaBonté, Québec
Page personnelle : http://www.iquebec.com/cyberiel



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