Re: Please help: Unicode sig in Hotmail

From: jshin@mailaps.org
Date: Fri Apr 12 2002 - 20:17:29 EDT


On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:

> No idea what everyone is complaining about. I just did the following:
>
> I had NO problems seeing the full text of the email in any of the above
 
  Nor did I have any problem with the original message (untagged UTF-8
message) sent from Hotmail web interface that began this thread.

> cases -- so Hotmail seems to have no problems whatsoever with UTF-8 text.

 You completely missed the point. Your experiment didn't add any
new information about Hotmail's UTF-8 support. Hotmail (when used in
its Web interface) does not properly tag outgoing messages. That is,
it doesn't add 'charset=UTF-8'. It just blindly passes UTF-8 text
thru. Have you checked the Content-Type header field of your message
sent from Hotmail web interface? Does it have the following header?

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Stephan and Ben wrote that Hotmail doesn't tag UTF-8 messages
properly. That's also what I guessed from Shlomi Til's message sent with
Hotmail web interface as shown below. I've just confirmed it myself with
my 'dormant' hotmail account. The message body contains UTF-8 text,
but it doesn't have MIME charset parameter.

Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft
SMTPSVC; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 23:21:43 -0700
Received: from 212.179.240.35 by lw3fd.law3.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP;
        Fri, 12 Apr 2002 06:21:42 GMT
From: "Shlomi Tal" <shlompi@hotmail.com>
Subject: Please help: Unicode sig in Hotmail
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 06:21:42 +0000
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Message-ID: <F841UbDBRArVc4Iu1B6000027bb@hotmail.com>
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 12 Apr 2002 06:21:43.0200 (UTC)
    FILETIME=[507C3A00:01C1E1EA]

According to Ben, MIME charset parameter to use to **tag** an outgoing
message (in C-T header and RFC-2047 encoding of header fields) is
determined by the interface language and cannot be selected *independent
of* the interface language. There's no encoding option anywhere in Hotmail
configuration menu. That's what we've been talking about and what I'd
call a 'classical mistake' of not-so-properly I18N/L10Nized programs,
namely, tying the interface language to one of legacy encodings
'traditionally' used for that language although they should/must be
decoupled from each other.

To make this issue more prominent, try to type in some characters in
UTF-8 in subject and see what you get with your interface lang. set to
English in Hotmail web interface. For instance, type in some
Greek characters into subject (say, "αβγ") and see if you get either
(in 'detailed view' or sth. like that in MS OE which shows
you 'raw RFC-2047 headers')

Subject: =?UTF-8?B?zrHOss6z?=

or

Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?=CE=B1=CE=B2=CE=B3?=

The result of my experiment is negative. Now, change the interface
language to one of non-English options. Choose French or German and
do the same experiment. You'll get a very interesting result :-)
Why don't you try yourself?

If you choose CJK, what you get is "αβγ" encoded in ISO-2022-JP,
Big5, GB2312(EUC-CN) and EUC-KR(Hotmail uses 'ks_c_5601-1987' as if it
wanted to show that it's a subsidiary of Microsoft)) because "αβγ"
happens to be covered by legacy CJK encodings. So, what you get is

Subject: =?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCJkEmQiZDGyhC?=

if you choose Japanese.

What I can conclude from this experiment is that to send your messages
in UTF-8 from hotmail web site, choose English as the interface
language. It's NOT properly tagged nor is header RFC-2047 encoded.
Nonetheless, you can make Hotmail blindly pass your text thru.
If you choose any other language, you'll get what I described
above.

> Same results when I sent via Outlook Express hotmail connection rather
> than the web site.

  It's almost nothing to do with Hotmail. In this case, it's just OE
that does the job well. When viewing your mesg. sent this way on Hotmail
web interface, it's MS IE that does the job.

  Jungshik Shin



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