Re: [VM] Incorrectly encoded non-ASCII headers

[Uday Reddy]

This is an important issue. As per the existing "standards", all message
headers have to be in ASCII (with other character setes duly encoded).

However, there is an RFC 6532, from February 2012, which is widely expected
to become a standard.

  http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6532

I think Thunderbird is implementing it already. Since Thunderbird is de
facto standard mail client now, more and more senders will end up using
utf-8.

I wonder if people can look through the RFC and figure out what changes we
need to make. Can we just process the entire incoming mail using utf-8?  I
am thinking that, since utf-8 is compatible with ASCII, any old MIME should
still get correctly handled.

Cheers,
Uday


Yeechang Lee writes:

> (Disclaimer: I am on Emacs 23 and VM 8.1.2.)
> 
> I sometimes receive messages in which headers--usually the subject
> line--uses non-ASCII characters without quoting them as per RFC
> 2047. (Wikipedia's article-of-the-day mailing list is a frequent
> offender.)
> 
> I realize the best solution is to have the sender change its ways and
> emit standards-adhering messages, but in the meanwhile, could VM gain
> the ability to assume that the body's encoding style in a message also
> applies to the headers? An alternative would be to assume that headers
> are 8-bit clean unless RFC 2047-style quoting appears. (Can either be
> done on our own with some elisp in the meanwhile, I wonder? I wouldn't
> want the message itself modified; just the presentation buffer.)
>