Re: Character display problem in mumi and my mail client

[Arun Isaac]

Hi,

Thanks for the bug report!

> It appears that mumi (or at least the instance of it running on 
> issues.guix.gnu.org) has problems displaying some non-ASCII characters. I 
> noticed it with '’'. Compare
>
> https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/36207
>
> with
>
> https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=36207
>
> In the former, Ludo's name displays as 'Ludo¢' while it the latter, it 
> displays correctly as 'Ludo’'.
>
> However, in Ludo's reply the character is displayed correctly.
>
> Does this indicate that my mail client (alpine on Debian Stretch) is doing 
> the wrong thing? It seems that mumi could handle this situation better 
> since it debbugs appears to handle it correctly.
>
> Looking at the raw mail downloaded from debbugs, I see that I'm sending 
> mail as with the following encoding:
>
> ```
> Content-Type: text/plain; FORMAT=flowed; CHARSET=ISO-8859-7
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT
> ```
>
> while Ludo's mail is:
>
> ```
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
> ```
>
> Interestingly, when I download the mbox file for my mail from debbugs, and 
> looking at it Emacs with my en_us.UTF-8 locale, the cents-symbol appears. 
> Using iconv to convert the file from ISO-8859-7 to UTF8, causes the 
> correct character to display. So what looks to be happening is that mumi 
> is interpreting my messages using the wrong encoding.
>
> Thoughts? Is this something we want to fix?

I think this is a bug in guile-email. On brief examination, I found that
guile-email is assuming charset of UTF-8 when the
Content-Transfer-Encoding is 8bit. This is incorrect behaviour. I will
fix this soon.

Regards,
Arun.

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