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Japanese mojibake in title or title and body

#684

With Japanese language e-mail, some of it arrives fine, some is mojibake in the title but with readable body text, some is mojibake in the sender and title but with readable body text, and some is mojibake in the title and body text.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

The accounts in question are Google Apps mail accounts (Gmail with custom domains).

For an e-mail with mojibake title only I see a content type header:

Content-Type: text/plain;charset="iso-2022-jp"

For an e-mail with mojibake in both the title and body text I don't see a Content-Type header.

Sparrow is not having this problem, so I assume that the problem is client-side, or perhaps Sparrow is detecting and correcting character encoding problems in the e-mails that MailMate isn't. I remember a developer once explained to me that to be safe he needed to sample a certain number of bytes in the text and use them to guess at the character set. Here's the bible on this stuff: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596514471.do ("CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition," Ken Lunde)

Reported by Meindert · March 25th, 2014 @ 05:25 AM

State: new
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. benny
    benny

    I recently added that MailMate looks for any specified charsets in the message and then uses that as default for any missing charset-definitions. This worked well for various badly formatted Russian emails. I've now made sure that this would also work for iso-2022-jp (and family).

    You can send example messages to me using “Help ▸ Send Feedback” (use “Message ▸ Forward as Attachment”) and I'll examine what the exact problem is.

    (MailMate doesn't guess based on samples (at least not yet).)

    March 25th, 2014 @ 08:19 AM

  2. benny
    benny

    Hold down ⌥ when clicking “Check Now” in the Software Update preferences pane to try out the change mentioned in the previous update to this ticket.

    March 25th, 2014 @ 10:59 AM

  3. Meindert
    Meindert

    Thanks, there seem to be fewer problems now (although I think I deleted many of the problem e-mails the other day, many of which were commercial).

    I saved a few examples of remaining problems and I'll try to send them on, but now I seem to be having SMTP problems when I try to use Help > Send Feedback.

    March 27th, 2014 @ 06:42 AM

  4. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to resolved

    Thanks for the examples. I've improved the “guessing” a bit. A new test release is available.

    March 27th, 2014 @ 10:59 AM

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