RE: Euro in Email headers, misinformation?

From: Roozbeh Pournader (roozbeh@sharif.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 25 2001 - 15:47:53 EST


On Tue, 25 Dec 2001, Dr. International wrote:

> In fact, I didn't know about RFC 2047. Unfortunately my contacts in the
> Exchange team did not mention that this might be the reason for the lost
> Euro in the subject line. A quick search on the internet leads me to
> believe that mail servers, which implement RFC 2047 will keep the Euro
> (for that matter any character) in the subject intact, if the client can
> understand it. Is that right? I have to admit that mail severs are not
> one of my areas of expertise.

Sorry for getting angry, and thanks for the clarification.

But to get to the problem, no, it's not related to mail servers as far as
I know. Mail servers don't need to implement RFC 2047, they should support
it automatically, since it's ASCII compatible. It's the mail readers that
should support it. So this is a realm for Outlook and Outlook Express, and
not Exchange. (I do not know how these two implement RFC 2047, I have not
tested them throughly yet.)

But to get back to what has happened with some of your failed tests, I
guess the problem is 8-bit headers. Some mail composers send the subject
line as 8-bit, without doing any RFC 2047 conversion (Outlook/Outlook
Express may be among them, I don't know). Then some mail servers may strip
any eighth bit, remaining conformant to RFC 2822.

The other possible source of problem is the mail reader not respecting RFC
2047, showing the subject line as gibberish.

It would be great if you update the column. I am available for any kind of
help I may be able to give.

best,
roozbeh



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