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ra

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Dec 1, 2009, 9:13:15 AM12/1/09
to
Hello all,

I have been using VM since late 90's and I am very happy to see that
it's once again on the move! :)

On Emacs 23.1.1 (macosx 10.5.8) I have a problem to see non-ascii
characters (they get garbled) when

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

and

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

I wonder if this is really a VM error, when editing the latter email-
header to quoted-printable on can see the characters as they should
be. Someone got some thoughts about this?

By the way, I am currently using VM 8.1 development version rev 617
but the error is also in 8.0.12 and 8.0.13 (swapped to 8.1 due to bug
#453351 and #322735).

yours,
/robert

Uday S Reddy

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Dec 1, 2009, 12:30:03 PM12/1/09
to
ra wrote:

> On Emacs 23.1.1 (macosx 10.5.8) I have a problem to see non-ascii

> characters (they get garbled) when ...

Hi Robert, thanks for participating here. The revision 617 includes all
the patches I have for handling binary/8bit content. So, please do file
a bug report on launchpad, and attach a sample message or two that cause
problems. It would also be useful to know if these problems are present
with Emacs 22.

Cheers,
Uday

Uday S Reddy

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Dec 1, 2009, 2:34:45 PM12/1/09
to
ra wrote:
>
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
> I wonder if this is really a VM error, when editing the latter email-
> header to quoted-printable on can see the characters as they should
> be. Someone got some thoughts about this?

Gosh, it took me a couple of readings to understand what you were saying. If you change the content-transfer-encoding to quoted-printable, then the characters come out ok? Well, yeah, that means that the message reached you with a wrong header.

If you can tell us which mailer generated the message (look for an X-Mailer header line or other clues) we can try and see if other people have noticed similar problems with the mailer.

Cheers,
Uday

ra

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Dec 2, 2009, 9:22:26 AM12/2/09
to

> If you can tell us which mailer generated the message (look for an X-Mailer header line or other clues) we can try and see if other people have noticed similar problems with the mailer.

X-Mailer does not exist but User-Agent states

User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 (Macintosh/20080213)

and

User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Windows/20090812)

so I need to do some additional testing... install Thunderbird and get
back to you with the result

yours,
/robert

ra

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Dec 2, 2009, 9:31:01 AM12/2/09
to

Ah forgot to mention that it only seems to happen when they reply to
my emails, so therefore I am slightly concerned... but I will try find
time to do some additional testing

yours,
/robert

Uday S Reddy

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Dec 2, 2009, 10:45:09 AM12/2/09
to
ra wrote:
>
> I wonder if this is really a VM error, when editing the latter email-
> header to quoted-printable on can see the characters as they should
> be. Someone got some thoughts about this?

If you save the message to a file, and visit it in Emacs as a plain text file, do the characters appear correctly? Does the buffer-file-coding-system say utf-8?

Cheers,
Uday

Uday S Reddy

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Dec 2, 2009, 1:57:56 PM12/2/09
to
ra wrote:

> On Emacs 23.1.1 (macosx 10.5.8) I have a problem to see non-ascii
> characters (they get garbled) when
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> and
>
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
> I wonder if this is really a VM error, when editing the latter email-
> header to quoted-printable on can see the characters as they should
> be. Someone got some thoughts about this?

Perchance, I received today a message sent from our webmail system, which had "8bit" encoding, and VM failed to display it correctly. When I changed the encoding header to quoted-printable, it displayed correctly. However, the characters were not actually encoded. So, VM is indeed behaving strangely.

This is happening when the entire message body is in utf-8 with "8bit" encoding. When one of the MIME parts is in utf-8 with "8bit" encoding, VM seems to deal with it ok.

I will register a bug report.

Thanks,
Uday

ra

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Dec 2, 2009, 2:56:15 PM12/2/09
to
On Dec 2, 7:57 pm, Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTre...@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:

> Perchance, I received today a message sent from our webmail system, which had "8bit" encoding, and VM failed to display it correctly.  When I changed the encoding header to quoted-printable, it displayed correctly.  However, the characters were not actually encoded.  So, VM is indeed behaving strangely.  
>
> This is happening when the entire message body is in utf-8 with "8bit" encoding.  When one of the MIME parts is in utf-8 with "8bit" encoding, VM seems to deal with it ok.  
>
> I will register a bug report.

Great then I will not persue the additional testing. Good work!

yours,
/robert

Uday S Reddy

unread,
Dec 2, 2009, 6:52:37 PM12/2/09
to
ra wrote:

>
> Great then I will not persue the additional testing. Good work!

Some more progress. If you are using any custom setting for
vm-mime-default-face-charsets or any other related variable, can you
remove those settings, and see if the UTF-8 display works?

(I tracked my problem down to this variable.)

Cheers,
Uday

ra

unread,
Dec 3, 2009, 3:04:54 PM12/3/09
to

Yes, after setting it to nil VM displays the characters correctly.
Thank you!

yours,
/robert

ps. I tried to post a reply with gnus (too much spam on google groups)
using news-server news.gnus.org but it does not show... sorry if you
get two messages from me with similar contents. :P

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