German umlauts, UTF-8 declaration missing?

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ohaaho
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Mar 05, 2010 8:46 pm

German umlauts, UTF-8 declaration missing?

Post by ohaaho »

I recently purchased OE classic (OEC) running on Win10 which is quite similar to the old Outlook Express. I know that other options do exist, but this one is most liked by my wife. She does not want to use MS Outlook, Firebird or other clients. Needless to explain in more detail :-)
Living in a German speaking area, we use German umlauts: äöüßÄÖÜ
These umlauts are not displayed correctly in certain situations. PopPeeper is set to create messages in "quoted printable".
1) Umlauts are displayed wrongly in OEC, in emails received via Microsoft exchange server and are replaced by black strange characters, when it is not a multi-part message. The change of sending a pure text mail without attachments to Base64, automatic (QP) or none, does not change anything.
2) As already mentioned, when attaching a file, PopPeeper creates a multi-part message and all is fine.

I contacted the OEC developer and they say that the declaration UTF-8 was missing inside the email. They further say that I was probably using an obsolete email client which would not respect the standardisation rules. Please see attached files.

Is there any proven advice who is right or wrong? More, importantly, is there any chance to force PopPeeper to use UTF-8 or to declare that it's UTF-8, or to force PopPeeper to create a multi-part message even if there is no attachment? For example MS-Outlook always creates a multi-part message regardless of an attachment.
Btw, the setting of localisation (region settings) inside Windows, stated in previous contributions to the umlaut subject has no influence on this.
Any help will be very welcome.
Peter
Attachments
PopPeeper EML file with attachment displayed correctly although UTF-8 is not declared.
PopPeeper EML file with attachment displayed correctly although UTF-8 is not declared.
PopPeeper EML file without attachment displayed wrongly and UTF-8 is not declared.
PopPeeper EML file without attachment displayed wrongly and UTF-8 is not declared.
Reaction from OEC development that UTF-8 declaration was missing.
Reaction from OEC development that UTF-8 declaration was missing.
ohaaho
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Mar 05, 2010 8:46 pm

Re: German umlauts, UTF-8 declaration missing?

Post by ohaaho »

Just one more info from the OEC development regarding the described subject:
Super! POPPeeper is the latest version from 2020.
It doesn't respect the RFC:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#page-14
rfc2045, section 5.2
Default RFC 822 messages without a MIME Content-Type header are taken
by this protocol to be plain text in the US-ASCII character set,
which can be explicitly specified as:
US-ASCII is NOT UTF-8. No matter what they think.
This is a bug in POPPeeper and should be reported to them, not us.

This is the US-ASCII set:
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ascii.html
It defines character codes from 0 (NULL) to 127 (RUBOUT).
It completely doesn't define anything above 127.
The behavior of POP peeper is clear violation of the standard.
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Jeff
Admin / Developer
Posts: 9225
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2001 9:46 pm

Re: German umlauts, UTF-8 declaration missing?

Post by Jeff »

OEC is correct. The base problem is that POP Peeper doesn't support unicode, and is more complicated than simply declaring a utf-8 charset in the header. However, this is already (finally) being worked on, so it will be addressed.
ohaaho
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Mar 05, 2010 8:46 pm

Re: German umlauts, UTF-8 declaration missing?

Post by ohaaho »

Thank you Jeff.
No matter, that OEC is correct, the interesting thing is that MS Outlook or Thunderbird translate the incoming umlaut email correctly even if not declared as UTF-8 by Poppeeper.
On the other hand, MS Outlook always creates multi-part outgoing messages, no matter whether there is an attachment. This at least on my computer where MS Outlook is installed with default settings. In this way OEC translates the incoming umlauts correctly because it is a multi-part.

If Poppeeper would do the same as MS Outlook does i.e. multi-part messages regardless of the attachment, my problem was solved. I understand that the entire UTF-8 problem may be more complicated, but this is what I can contribute to the situation.
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Jeff
Admin / Developer
Posts: 9225
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2001 9:46 pm

Re: German umlauts, UTF-8 declaration missing?

Post by Jeff »

I've sent this to ohaaho via email, but in case anyone else is interested in a stopgap solution (until unicode is supported), v5.1 will allow you to specify the character set when POP Peeper would otherwise leave it empty (POP Peeper does specify a character set in certain situations, but not for us-ascii or iso-8859-1). The following change can be made pre-v5.1, but will have no effect until v5.1.


1) In POP Peeper, go to:
main menu: Tools / Options / Storage

2) Double-click on the text, "Ini Location" -- this will open File Explorer and select the ini file

3) Exit POP Peeper

4) Open the ini file from step #2 (double-clicking it should open the file in your text editor)

5) Search for:
[Plugin_SendMail]

6) Directly below that line, enter the following line:
CharSet = iso-8859-1

"iso-8859-1" can be any character set, but please don't try utf-8, it may work for your specific needs, but iso-8859-1 is more accurate. So the ini file will have this:

[Plugin_SendMail]
CharSet = iso-8859-1

7) Save and close the ini file

8) Restart POP Peeper


To be clear, most people probably don't need to do this and this is simply a way to override the character set as a temporary solution.
Last edited by Jeff on Wed Dec 30, 2020 6:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: disable smilies
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