Hi there,
Just a quick question to ground myself. Is there anyone that needs to set an outgoing mail encoding directly? I would like to simplify the mail sending code by removing support for (and the setting for) sending non-utf-8 email.
Is that functionality used, or required for some specific reason?
I guess it was needed 20 years ago, when UTF-8 was not supported everywhere, when Windows email softwares were expecting to have messages text being encoding in the same code page as the user selected one, because UTF-8 was not the default encoding widely supported then.
Since, both Windows and email softwares has switched to UTF-8 as default encoding. MacOS X is UTF-8 native since start also, IIRC. So is iOS and Android.
So I guess it’s no more needed, indeed.
But maybe I miss something here.
Since I am also active in the FreeDOS world, I occasionally come across an old text file that needs to be translated into UTF-8. I can’t remember the last time I had to translate something from UTF-8.
As for email, I imagine there are some people with archives of 20 year old mails, but again, you’d only want to change those into UTF-8, the new ASCII. There are standalone utilities for conversion, so I think it is safe to remove this from the Haiku email system.
I’m not touching the option to decode incoming mail, that is still available, This would only be about outgoing email
Well, usually if one receives a non-utf8 email, it can be that the reply should be non-utf8 too.
Maybe that would help - I’d be interested to hear if any mail application does that.
It’s often a problem here in Portugal. I send them UTF-8. I don’t know what they see, but their reply’s plain text part is iso-8859-1, with my email included still in UTF-8.
The HTML part is also, per body structure MIME declaration, iso-8859-1 – but the text in it is UTF-8! In this case recoded, so the two-byte character that wasn’t properly recoded in the plain text reply, is now four bytes.
This is Microsoft stuff, of course. Word 15 claims authorship of the web page.
I don’t have any way to predict how it will go, though. Sometimes I get UTF-8 back, of course. But if I were engaged in some continuing exchange with the above correspondent, being able to switch to iso-8859-1 mode would be convenient. Pretty messy though, to implement, and what a joke, that I’m talking about such sophistication in a home made email program while Microsoft peddles this brain damage for billions.
Anyway, I guess it’s just among the many things the Portuguese put up with. The issue might be much more problematic when communicating with one’s elderly aunt in Korea or something, where it isn’t just a busted diacritical here and there.
Keeping support for different encodings are important for historical purposes and data accessibility in my opinion. If anything, we should have encode/decode support for all available encodings, Haiku does not have support for a few of them even.
Do your contacts have trouble vieweing the email you send? I’ve had trouble with it not actually sending utf-8 (it didn’t send the charset at all, but it was utf-8)
Maybe you can verify that it actually sets the charset for your outgoing mail, and if not try setting the encodning for outgoing mails explicitly (in a seperate settings screen in the Mail app)
If your contacts can then view your email correctly that would be all there is to do, can’t do much about incoming emails having set the wrong encoding in its charset unfortunately, but you can use the encoding menu for incoming mail to view it.
No one has complained, but it’s a safe bet that if they send it back garbled, they’re looking at it garbled. They’re just used to it. I should clarify that in my case it isn’t about [Haiku] Mail, which I do not use. I’m just relating my experience in a European language world with abundant diacriticals, and how that might relate to a desire to send non-UTF-8.
In a sense this is a lowest common denominator problem - the stupidest software is going to be the one that deals only in the obsolete character set, and the software that can deal with UTF-8 can probably deal with both. I’m not going to start using ISO-8859-1 by default for that reason, but it’s a reason.
The question here is specifically for sending outgoing email. Not receiving email, not even opening your old email files.
We are of course not removing support for other encodings elsewhere in the system. Just for sending emails. Unless you are sending them into a time machine, historical purposes and data accessibility should not be a problem in this case?
Vintage machines and newly produced vintage-themed machines come to mind. Also I’m sure there are always tty users without GUI that prefers a minimal environment.
It’s not many, yes, but there are cases like these I guess.