flyguy wrote:
On 2/18/2011 4:45 PM, Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
flyguy wrote:
Most of the emails I get display correctly with Western (ISO-8859-1),
but a few have some strange characters (e.g., †) unless I select
Unicode (UTF-8). Occasionally, this also happens on web sites. The Help
info doesn't seem to match my choices in Preferences.
Is there anyway to have SM 2 use the correct encoding automatically?
Yes and no.
Most emails sent to you have info in the (hidden) header that tells the
receiving program (in our case, SeaMonkey) what encoding to use. For
example, your post said:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Sometimes (especially with webmails), this information is absent, so
SeaMonkey will fall back on whatever default you have set. If you look
at your prefs under Mail & Newsgroups | Character Encoding, the first
setting is your default for message display. If most of your
correspondence is in Western, this is a good choice.
And sometimes the sending program lies to SeaMonkey and specifies an
encoding different from the one used to compose the message.
In cases where the info is absent or the sending program lies, you have
to manually select the correct encoding. Sorry. But when the incoming
message is well-formed (contains accurate info on encoding), SeaMonkey
does automatically select the correct encoding.
The situation with websites is similar. If they tell the truth,
SeaMonkey is fine. If they are silent or misleading, SeaMonkey can guess
wrong or be deceived.
Hmmm, I think the webmail might explain most of them. I'll look into
that. Is there any way to flag a person in my address book with the
encoding that should be used when receiving email from them? Same thing
- can an encoding be specified for a website or domain?
I know of no way, but perhaps the experts do.
If you have a relationship to the organization that owns the website,
you might politely suggest to the webmaster that they shape up.
A reasonable workaround might be to specify Unicode as your default
encoding. Then a Western message will be fine (since it's a subset of
Unicode), and so will a Unicode message. If you don't work with foreign
languages (русский язык, 한국말, etc.), that should do.
Of course, cases where the sending program lies will still have to be
fixed manually.
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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