From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Mar 16 2005 - 10:36:18 CST
On 16/03/2005 15:45, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> ...
> Huh? If there is no character set specified by the email, how is
> Thunderbird supposed to know that the characters are supposed to be
> Hebrew and not accented Latin? ...
Thunderbird is the sending mail client, not the receiving one. Of course
my receiving Mozilla doesn't know the characters are supposed to be
Hebrew. In fact they aren't, because the default for e-mail with no
character set specified is US-ASCII, and so any characters above 128 are
illegal codes and should be displayed as such.
> ... You can quibble with what it uses for a default, and probably
> change it, but you can't fault it for making a mistake with nothing to
> go on. I've had several messages on some mailing lists that need a a
> little gentle application of View->Character Encoding, presumably
> because the mailing-list software didn't put on an encoding or put on
> the wrong one (yes, they do that. They'll accept a message from
> someone clearly labelled UTF-8 and send it out unmodified but labelled
> ISO-8859-1).
Indeed, but we checked that this wasn't the problem with this mailing
list system, Yahoo groups, which does correctly process character sets -
at least for mail sent on individually, there are some problems with
digests and messages read from the website.
>
> It sounds to me like the problems described stem from
> browsers/mailreaders that get the wrong encoding, and it probably
> isn't their fault most of the time, but the sender's (or relayer's).
In this case it was the sender's problem, as I thought I had made clear.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.7.3 - Release Date: 15/03/2005
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