Re: mailto body text encoding?
-Original Message- From: Rene Merz [EMAIL PROTECTED] The (sometimes strange) behaviour of different mail clients (incl. PM) can be compared with this list: http://www.tandb.com.au/email/clients/ Very interesting too. The only problem with this particular site is that the versions tested were quite old, and limited to Mac OS only (and then only Mac OS 8 and earlier it looks like). I'm not sure anybody has the time to do a true comparison these days with so many different options on the various computer platforms. Wayne
Re: mailto body text encoding?
Rene Merz wrote: The (sometimes strange) behaviour of different mail clients (incl. PM) can be compared with this list: http://www.tandb.com.au/email/clients/ Very interesting too. Hmmm, above all, it seems to be one thing: completely outdated (1999-11-26). PowerMail 2.2? I'm using 5.2.1 at the moment, and I'm using AppleScript objects beyond window and document quite successfully :-) Regards, Christian.
Re: mailto body text encoding?
Wayne Brissette wrote: This is getting more and more interesting... Here are the results of my quick testing: [snip] The (sometimes strange) behaviour of different mail clients (incl. PM) can be compared with this list: http://www.tandb.com.au/email/clients/ Very interesting too.
Re: mailto body text encoding?
-Original Message- From: Christian Roth [EMAIL PROTECTED] An 'ü' would therefore be encoded like this: ü = Unicode: 0xFC = UTF-8: 0xC3 0xBC = URL: %C3%BC (At least this is what I am doing with URLs with hi-ASCII characters in my own product.) This is getting more and more interesting... Here are the results of my quick testing: PowerMail = some odd characters Mail.app = ü Windows w/outlook: NO BODY at all Solaris w/Netscape: some odd characters So again while I think Rene is right that something isn't kosher, I don't think it's PowerMail's fault. It seems that lots of applications have this issue across multiple platforms. Some other quick tests leaving the ü character as is and not encoding. PowerMail = some odd characters Mail.app = ü Windows w/outlook: NO BODY at all Solaris w/Netscape: a totally different character than what I expected, but then again, character mappings are different between the Mac and PC and Solaris. Wayne
Re: mailto body text encoding?
Am 21.10.2005 hat PowerMail Engineering geschrieben: The normal case should be, that the body text is transfered *how_it_is*! And just this is not the case with PM. I have not thoroughly checked the RFCs recently about this point, but I think nothing is specified for encoding non US-ASCII characters in a mailto URL; and non US-ASCII characters in an URL are invalid, as there is no specification of the charset they would use. If PM would respect the mailto URL scheme of RFC 2368 (http://www.rfc- editor.org/rfc/rfc2368.txt) then it would be possible to encode non- ASCII-signs in the mailto-body into hexdec-signs with preceding %-sign. But PM ignores it.
Re: mailto body text encoding?
Rene Merz wrote: The normal case should be, that the body text is transfered *how_it_is*! And just this is not the case with PM. I have not thoroughly checked the RFCs recently about this point, but I think nothing is specified for encoding non US-ASCII characters in a mailto URL; and non US-ASCII characters in an URL are invalid, as there is no specification of the charset they would use. Jérôme - PowerMail Engineering - In this world, you generally get what you pay for. PowerMail is worth paying for. Download a demo. You might just like it better than your current email program. That's how I switched to this great program that really performs. PowerMail user comment on www.versiontracker.com Download a demo version from www.ctmdev.com -
Re: mailto body text encoding?
And I know, how I can handle this problem: Inside FileMaker I have to resolve all the umlauts into two letters. It isn't smart, but it helps. But this is what the standard tells you to do with the mail to as well. Space should be encoded to %20, so this means that umlauts would be %dc or %fc, which I tried by the way with PowerMail... a new issue occurred which prevented mail from using this at all, PM encoded it wrong, but I also didn't specify the encoding type, which I'm not convinced I can do with a simple mailto, for this I do think I'll need to process the data and in addition to encoding the message, manually write all the headers, which means I wouldn't use any commercial mail apps anyhow, I would use PostFix. That said, depending on what you are trying to do, it sounds like you're on the right track, but based on my quick experiments here, I think there is a lot more to it and I think if you pour over several of the standards you should find the answer (part of it is already staring us right in the face -- don't use 8-bit characters. That is spelled out in the RFC, yet you seem to want to ignore it. which to me already calls into question the bug. PM does seem to handle this situation rather oddly, but then I'm told not to do what I'm doing, so is it really a bug? My experience with QA departments would tell me that while it might not behave exactly correctly, it isn't misbehaving since the standard says not to do it). Best of luck with whatever it is you're going to be doing with this, but I doubt you'll get much traction from the PM engineers on this one either. Wayne
Re: mailto body text encoding?
Would be nice if it would be that easy! But the encoding Über with #220; stops all transfer-flow of the body text just after that encoding; the rest of the mail text remains empty. The reason is obvious: the ampersand-sign () is strictly reserved for the codification of the mailto-string. (See again RFC2368: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2368.txt) No, sorry, it remains a PowerMail-bug! As I mentioned before, Apple Mail can handle incoming diacritic signs it without any problem! (Wayne Brissette wrote:) Well, I learned something today. It's not a FM bug, but nor is it a PowerMail bug. It's a STANDARDS issue. Check out RFC 2368, it seems that you must encode the body= part of the mailto: according to the RFC. My guess is that in the Apple Message Frameworks they are handling this for you, which is why it works in mail.app, but not PowerMail. However if you want to send a character like: Ü or ß, you have to encode it. Thus you end up with: Über = #220;ber weißt = wei#223;t Anyhow, check out the RFC: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2368.html I think you'll find it very enlightening. Wayne -Original Message- From: Rene Merz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Oct 20, 2005 12:41 PM To: PowerMail discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: mailto body text encoding? No it isn't a FileMaker problem at all! It's a pure PowerMail-bug! Doing the same with Apple mail.app it works fine! Diactrictic signs are transfered as they are, no need to encode them. This is a problem with FileMaker. I remember that at Apple we had to write a bunch of custom email headers for the email in order to have FileMaker do what we needed with non US-ASCII characters. I'll dig through my old scripts and see if I can dig up anything, but I only have access to the scripts I wrote and compiled as AppleScript files. Things which I wrote and were included as part of FileMaker's custom scripts I no longer have access to and I think that's where we ended up burying that piece of code. Wayne -Original Message- From: Rene Merz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Oct 20, 2005 10:20 AM To: PowerMail discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: mailto body text encoding? I abuse mailto for transfering mails from FileMaker to PowerMail and to send them therefrom. Example of the FileMaker(FM)-script: -- mailto:FM_FIELD_ADDRESS?subject= FM_FIELD_SUBJECTbody=FM_FIELD_MAILTEXT -- Works fine. Unfortunately PowerMail doesn't support from= in the mailto string (unlike other programs so as Eudora, see http://www.tandb.com.au/email/ clients/). Anyway. -- The much bigger problem is: the diacritic signs (like the german umlauts) come in a very strange form into the PowerMail mailtext. Converting such signs into ASCI or Unicode code (with preceding %-sign) couldn't help. Is there a way to encode such diacritic signs in the body of mailto in a form which PowerMail accepts?
Re: mailto body text encoding?
Well, I learned something today. It's not a FM bug, but nor is it a PowerMail bug. It's a STANDARDS issue. Check out RFC 2368, it seems that you must encode the body= part of the mailto: according to the RFC. My guess is that in the Apple Message Frameworks they are handling this for you, which is why it works in mail.app, but not PowerMail. However if you want to send a character like: Ü or ß, you have to encode it. Thus you end up with: Über = #220;ber weißt = wei#223;t Anyhow, check out the RFC: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2368.html I think you'll find it very enlightening. Wayne -Original Message- From: Rene Merz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Oct 20, 2005 12:41 PM To: PowerMail discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: mailto body text encoding? No it isn't a FileMaker problem at all! It's a pure PowerMail-bug! Doing the same with Apple mail.app it works fine! Diactrictic signs are transfered as they are, no need to encode them. This is a problem with FileMaker. I remember that at Apple we had to write a bunch of custom email headers for the email in order to have FileMaker do what we needed with non US-ASCII characters. I'll dig through my old scripts and see if I can dig up anything, but I only have access to the scripts I wrote and compiled as AppleScript files. Things which I wrote and were included as part of FileMaker's custom scripts I no longer have access to and I think that's where we ended up burying that piece of code. Wayne -Original Message- From: Rene Merz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Oct 20, 2005 10:20 AM To: PowerMail discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: mailto body text encoding? I abuse mailto for transfering mails from FileMaker to PowerMail and to send them therefrom. Example of the FileMaker(FM)-script: -- mailto:FM_FIELD_ADDRESS?subject= FM_FIELD_SUBJECTbody=FM_FIELD_MAILTEXT -- Works fine. Unfortunately PowerMail doesn't support from= in the mailto string (unlike other programs so as Eudora, see http://www.tandb.com.au/email/ clients/). Anyway. -- The much bigger problem is: the diacritic signs (like the german umlauts) come in a very strange form into the PowerMail mailtext. Converting such signs into ASCI or Unicode code (with preceding %-sign) couldn't help. Is there a way to encode such diacritic signs in the body of mailto in a form which PowerMail accepts?
Re: mailto body text encoding?
No it isn't a FileMaker problem at all! It's a pure PowerMail-bug! Doing the same with Apple mail.app it works fine! Diactrictic signs are transfered as they are, no need to encode them. This is a problem with FileMaker. I remember that at Apple we had to write a bunch of custom email headers for the email in order to have FileMaker do what we needed with non US-ASCII characters. I'll dig through my old scripts and see if I can dig up anything, but I only have access to the scripts I wrote and compiled as AppleScript files. Things which I wrote and were included as part of FileMaker's custom scripts I no longer have access to and I think that's where we ended up burying that piece of code. Wayne -Original Message- From: Rene Merz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Oct 20, 2005 10:20 AM To: PowerMail discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: mailto body text encoding? I abuse mailto for transfering mails from FileMaker to PowerMail and to send them therefrom. Example of the FileMaker(FM)-script: -- mailto:FM_FIELD_ADDRESS?subject= FM_FIELD_SUBJECTbody=FM_FIELD_MAILTEXT -- Works fine. Unfortunately PowerMail doesn't support from= in the mailto string (unlike other programs so as Eudora, see http://www.tandb.com.au/email/ clients/). Anyway. -- The much bigger problem is: the diacritic signs (like the german umlauts) come in a very strange form into the PowerMail mailtext. Converting such signs into ASCI or Unicode code (with preceding %-sign) couldn't help. Is there a way to encode such diacritic signs in the body of mailto in a form which PowerMail accepts?
Re: mailto body text encoding?
This is a problem with FileMaker. I remember that at Apple we had to write a bunch of custom email headers for the email in order to have FileMaker do what we needed with non US-ASCII characters. I'll dig through my old scripts and see if I can dig up anything, but I only have access to the scripts I wrote and compiled as AppleScript files. Things which I wrote and were included as part of FileMaker's custom scripts I no longer have access to and I think that's where we ended up burying that piece of code. Wayne -Original Message- From: Rene Merz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Oct 20, 2005 10:20 AM To: PowerMail discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: mailto body text encoding? I abuse mailto for transfering mails from FileMaker to PowerMail and to send them therefrom. Example of the FileMaker(FM)-script: -- mailto:FM_FIELD_ADDRESS?subject= FM_FIELD_SUBJECTbody=FM_FIELD_MAILTEXT -- Works fine. Unfortunately PowerMail doesn't support from= in the mailto string (unlike other programs so as Eudora, see http://www.tandb.com.au/email/ clients/). Anyway. -- The much bigger problem is: the diacritic signs (like the german umlauts) come in a very strange form into the PowerMail mailtext. Converting such signs into ASCI or Unicode code (with preceding %-sign) couldn't help. Is there a way to encode such diacritic signs in the body of mailto in a form which PowerMail accepts?
mailto body text encoding?
I abuse mailto for transfering mails from FileMaker to PowerMail and to send them therefrom. Example of the FileMaker(FM)-script: -- mailto:FM_FIELD_ADDRESS?subject= FM_FIELD_SUBJECTbody=FM_FIELD_MAILTEXT -- Works fine. Unfortunately PowerMail doesn't support from= in the mailto string (unlike other programs so as Eudora, see http://www.tandb.com.au/email/ clients/). Anyway. -- The much bigger problem is: the diacritic signs (like the german umlauts) come in a very strange form into the PowerMail mailtext. Converting such signs into ASCI or Unicode code (with preceding %-sign) couldn't help. Is there a way to encode such diacritic signs in the body of mailto in a form which PowerMail accepts?
