charset for ticket mails should be set in ini file

[achim@…]

The default charset of the ticket mails is utf-8. If i try to read this mails with outlook i get an ugly view of a non monospaced mail. I have to switch to another charset manually in my ms outlook to see it right. So it would be nice if i could change the charset for the mails in the ini file. My patched version (changed charset) works perfectly for me, but i have to do it manually all the time i install a new version of trac.

[Manuzhai]

Attached patch makes the Notifier use the trac/default_charset ini-setting.

[Manuzhai]

This should fix #1065.

[jonas]

What happens if the ticket contains characters that the selected encoding can't represent?

is it really true that outlook can't handle utf-8 encoded emails? Or are we just not formatting them properly? I've never actually used outlook myself but I find it hard to believe that such a widely used email client can't handle utf-8 encoded emails.

[Manuzhai]

Well, I'm guessing in that case they might have a problem anyway, since the setting is already used in several other places as well. I'm not sure it's a use case you want to support?

Actually, do browsers change their input according to the page on which the form is served? Would make a lot of sense, but I'm not sure.

[otavio]

I found some information about Outlook support for UTF-8. You can take a look here: http://home.att.net/~jameskass/interoutlook.html

[otavio]

I did a try to solve it but I can't test to check if it works. Please, can someone check it?

[otavio]

Possible fix. Untested.

[Manuzhai]

That's what it already sends! Don't think that doesn't help much. :)

Check line 154, where MIMEText is instantiated with a content-type.

[otavio]

But then it's not trac fault but MUA fault. If we provide the headers with this information is MUA job deal with it...

Ok, could be useful allow the user set the encoding of mails. To me, for example, ISO-8859-1 is really fine so I can set it and solve this problem to my users otherwise looks like the user need to setup Outlook or any other MUA to view the message according the charset.

[Manuzhai]

Which is exactly what my patch does. :) jonas?

[jonas]

I'm not sure it's a good idea to start adding workarounds to Trac just because some people use broken/misconfigured email clients. A new FAQ entry explaining how to configure outlook express might be a better idea.

The "default_charset" setting is currently used to help Trac to convert file contents _to_ utf-8 when doing syntax highlighting. Trac always use utf-8 when sending stuff to the browser.

[Manuzhai]

That makes sense. So this should be closed:invalid? Or we should get someone using OE to write some text in the FAQ about how to configure it. :)

[jonas]

I would like that some OE user confirmed that this is just an OE-configuration issue and that (if needed) a FAQ-entry is added about how to properly configure OE.

[Manuzhai]

But since that would not be in the code, we can probably shift it to 0.9, right? ;)

[achim@…]

i would prefer not using the default charset for mailing. i would be better to use a new ini variable like smtp_charset to set charset for the notify mails.

[jonas]

Yeah, I agree with you. It's not a good idea to use "default_charset". _If_ we are going to add this workaround it should have it's own variable. But someone needs to show that this is not just an OE-configuration problem before we'll add anything.

[nepo@…]

I have tried it with Outlook (not Outlook Express, some people seem to mis up the two). Applying the notify-utf.diff patch does not make any difference. Outlook recognizes the mail as UTF-8 before and after the patch.

I think changing the carachter set to something different is the wrong way to solve this because the message content actually is encoded in UTF-8 after all. Since people use national language characters (I am German) using something other than UTF-8 produces wrong characters in the mail. I would blame Microsoft on this one.

As an alternative I suggest not using the dashed horizontal and vertical lines. That way it looked better with non-monospaced fonts.

[Norbert Unterberg <nepo@…>]

This is a pure Outlook error. It can be solved by seetting an option in MS Outlook. You can find the option here (don't know the exact english phrases, I have a German Outlook):

Extras --> Options... --> Email format --> Fonts ... --> International Fonts ...

Highlight Unicode in the language list, select Courier New as the proportional font, and chose Unicode (UTF-8) as encoding.

The only issue remaining with MS Outlook is #1139. I have not tried Outlook Express.

[otavio]

Since it's a Outlook fault this ticket can be closed IMHO. Like Jonas proposed, it need a entry on FAQ and only it.

Anyone don't agree?

[cmlenz]

If there's anything we're going to do about this, definitely not for 0.8.1.

[anonymous]

Just wanted to confirm that Norbert's fix solves the problem. This is purely an Outlook bug.

[jonas]

I've added a TracFaq entry so I'm closing this ticket now.