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[Regression] MIME header encoding is broken in VM 8.0.11

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Ulrich Mueller

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Sep 15, 2008, 10:16:17 AM9/15/08
to ha...@robf.de
Hi,

it seems that somewhere between VM 8.0.9 and 8.0.11, MIME (RFC 1522)
encoding of headers broke:

VM 8.0.9 would encode the word "Rückstoßdämpfung" in the Subject line as
follows:

=?iso-8859-1?Q?R=FCcksto=DFd=E4mpfung?=

which is still somewhat readable to the unaided eye. In VM 8.0.11 this
now becomes the following:

R=?iso-8859-1?B?/A==?=cksto=?iso-8859-1?B?3w==?=d=?iso-8859-1?B?5A==?=mpfung

Setting vm-mime-encode-headers-type to Q doesn't help much:

R=?iso-8859-1?Q?=FC?=cksto=?iso-8859-1?Q?=DF?=d=?iso-8859-1?Q?=E4?=mpfung

If I interpret RFC 1522 correctly, the method of VM 8.0.11 is plain
wrong here, since an encoded-word must be surrounded by white space and
is not allowed to start in the middle of a word (RFC 1522 section 5):

| Ordinary ASCII text and encoded-words may appear together in the same
| header field. However, an encoded-word that appears in a header field
| defined as "*text" MUST be separated from any adjacent encoded-word or
| "text" by linear-white-space.

And of course the MIME decoder shouldn't look for "=?" in the middle of
a word, but display the above as plain ASCII text (RFC 1522 section 6.1).

Ulrich

P.S. I also wonder why the default encoding was changed from
quoted-printable to binary? This doesn't make much sense, IMHO.

Ralf Fassel

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Jan 20, 2009, 10:46:11 AM1/20/09
to
* u...@gentoo.org (Ulrich Mueller)

| VM 8.0.9 would encode the word "Rückstoßdämpfung" in the Subject line as
| follows:
|
| =?iso-8859-1?Q?R=FCcksto=DFd=E4mpfung?=
|
| which is still somewhat readable to the unaided eye. In VM 8.0.11 this
| now becomes the following:
|
| R=?iso-8859-1?B?/A==?=cksto=?iso-8859-1?B?3w==?=d=?iso-8859-1?B?5A==?=mpfung
|
| Setting vm-mime-encode-headers-type to Q doesn't help much:
|
| R=?iso-8859-1?Q?=FC?=cksto=?iso-8859-1?Q?=DF?=d=?iso-8859-1?Q?=E4?=mpfung
|
| If I interpret RFC 1522 correctly, the method of VM 8.0.11 is plain
| wrong here, since an encoded-word must be surrounded by white space and
| is not allowed to start in the middle of a word (RFC 1522 section 5):

Is this supposed to be fixed in 8.0.12? I recently had an corrupted
INBOX due to some wrong Elisp in the parsed X-VM-data header...

If this should be fixed, I'd try to reproduce that and do an report.

R'

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