Bug 84429

Summary:	UTF-8 guide: incorrect remark about non-UTF8 charsets in mails
Product:	[OLD] Docs-user	Reporter:	Sascha Silbe <sascha-gentoo-bugzilla>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) <swift>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal	CC:	docs-team
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
URL:	http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/utf-8.xml
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Sascha Silbe 2005-03-07 13:03:43 UTC

The UTF-8 guide says:

> Note: You may still see '?' in mail you read with Mutt. This is a 
> result of people using Latin (ISO 8859) or another charset for email 
> transmission.
That's only partly true. The important thing is that the sender did not 
indicate the character set he used in the mail. Otherwise mutt (as almost 
any MUA) will automatically between the mail charset and the display charset.

> It is best to tell them to use UTF-8 for mail, and point 
> them to the IETF RFC 2277 (see References at the end of this 
> document).
No, that won't help, since now everyone using something different from UTF-8 will be unable to read their mails. The senders MUA needs to be fixed to add an appropriate charset parameter to the Content-Type header.

> Also note that in some lists, subscribers may not like
> UTF-8. Be sure that the group or person you are communicating with
> does not mind UTF-8.
You should differentiate between recipients not liking any UTF-8 mail (because they use a broken MUA) and recipients using a legacy charset, so their system can only render a subset of UTF-8, specifically excluding graphical characters (boxes/lines).

Comment 1 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2005-03-25 06:26:31 UTC

I've updated the guide to inform the user about the "?" mark (being incorrectly configured mail clients). I've removed the "tell them to" part.

Comment 2 Sascha Silbe 2005-03-27 09:54:13 UTC

Looks fine now. Thanks!