Alexandre Yudenitsch wrote:
Maybe someone reading this will understand and recognize the problems I
describe below, and know enough about SM/Mail to comment on them; I
realize that, probably, most will never have encountered something like
it, because it happens when you write and receive messages in different
text encoding options, and languages different from English...
First, a quick round-up of what I've managed to find involving text
encoding in SeaMonkey Mail:
...
Now, the problems: I send and receive e-mails in several languages (but
mostly English), ...
So do I. In my case, it's Russian (русский язык) and Korean (한국어).
Both have local encoding specifications such as KOI8-R and EUC-KR, but
are also amenable to Unicode.
First, when a message is received, the "auto-detect" is mostly worse
than useless, so I usually start it as "Unicode" or "Western", depending
on history ...
For incoming messages, this is usually the fault of the sender. If the
message is well-formed (specifies the encoding actually used, and that
specification is in the standard format), SM will recognize and
understand the specification and apply it. However, some senders live in
countries where everyone assumes that all messages are in the same local
encoding, so their email programs don't even bother to state the
encoding. If your receiving program doesn't make the same assumption, it
has to guess. And sometimes the sending program "lies" -- it says it
uses one encoding but actually uses another.
There are also things you can do at your end to sabotage the display of
well-formed messages.
The most common error on the receiving side is to specify a font that
doesn't work for the incoming encoding. For example, if you have
SeaMonkey set to display Thai text in a font that does not contain Thai
glyphs, you'll get garbage when you receive a well-formed Thai message.
Well, by garbage I mean you'll probably get boxes, or stuff like this: .
To see if this is the case, go to Edit | Preferences | Appearance |
Fonts, where you will see a pull-down list:
Fonts: [Western]
Below that, you'll see a list of six fonts for various conditions:
proportional, serif, sans-serif, etc.
Instead of "Western" at the top, pull down the encoding in question.
Let's suppose you choose "Cyrillic." In the list of six fonts that
follows, do all six fonts support Cyrillic? In other words, do those
fonts contain Cyrillic glyphs? If not, change to fonts that do.
Do this for all the encodings you typically receive. You can specify
different "sans-serif" fonts for different encodings -- e.g., Arial for
Cyrillic but DotumChe for Korean.
* * *
On the other hand, if SeaMonkey is using the wrong encoding to decipher
a message, instead of boxes you'll typically get "mojibake," which the
Russians call "крякозябры" and the French call "hiéroglyphes." Is that
what you're seeing?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake>
A common reason that SeaMonkey could choose the wrong encoding (other
than a sender whose computer lies about the encoding it used) is if the
user gives it improper guidance. For example, if you tell it "no matter
what you see, display it in Western encoding," messages with foreign
characters will be corrupted.
One place you should look is under Edit | Preferences | Appearance |
Fonts -- have you checked the box, "Allow documents to use other fonts"?
That's fine if you have lots of fonts installed, but if an incoming
message specifies a font you don't have, your system will have to
substitute something it does have, and that doesn't always work. I have
it checked, and it hasn't caused problems. Things may be different for
your correspondents.
For mixed-content messages, I recommend specifying Unicode when you
begin drafting (in the composition window, Options | Text Encoding |
Unicode). My implementation of SM does that on its own for all outgoing
messages (both plain text and HTML), which is very convenient. After
all, the definition of Unicode is that it supports all languages. You're
right that the encoding of an incoming message must be selected
correctly before you reply.
I have noticed that sometimes SM will guess wrong when I select a
message in a mail folder, but if I navigate away and then return it'll
guess right. I don't know why that is -- it seems to be sticking to the
encoding it used for the previous message that I just deleted.
HTH a little.
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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