219036 - When replying to a mesg. tagged US-ASCII, use the mail default charset for reply

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Ales Pecnik]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

I have set the default character coding in Preferences -> Mail & Newsgroup ->
Composition to be ISO-8859-2, because vast majority of my messages contain ISO-2
characters.

When I compose a message which contains only ASCII characters, it is sent with
us-ascii encoding, ignoring the abovementioned setting.

The problem arises when the person replies to my mail. If s/he uses ISO-2
characters (and s/he often does), s/he must manually change encoding to ISO-2,
if not, it is sent with funny characters.

A workaround is to set "Apply default to all messages in the folder (individual
character coding settings and auto-detection will be ignored", but then non
ISO-2 (eg UTF-8) mails will be displayed incorrectly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set default character coding to iso-8859-2.
2. Send an email which contains only ASCII characters - it will be sent as US-ASCII.
(3. Reply to this email using iso-8859-2 characters)

Actual Results:  
Mozilla ignores the settings.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should **always** honour the default settings, even if they are not
needed for sending a particular message.

Comment 1

[Jungshik Shin]

I don't think that's the 'right' solution because that wouldn't solve a problem
when replying to messages sent by other mail programs. Moreover, marking
US-ASCII only emails with US-ASCII is not required by any standard but is a
'good practice' that I don't want to see go away.

A better solution would be one of two:

1) when replying to a message in US-ASCII, the default charset should be made
the default mail composition charset instead of US-ASCII

2) In nsMsgCompose::CheckCharsetConversion, make that promotion (from US-ASCII
to the default mail composition charset)
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/mailnews/compose/src/nsMsgCompose.cpp#4780 

Perhaps, method 1 is safer than method 2.

Comment 2

[Jungshik Shin]

Reading bug 104064 comment #5, I realized that it may be necessary to extend
method #1 to ISO-8859-1 as well provided that the message being replied to is
ASCII-only. However, checking 'ASCII-ness' can be expensive. Another way to deal
with it is to add an option (pref-entry)
'ignore-charset-of-msg-being-replied-to' (should be a better name for this.
'always-use-my-default-charset' may work.). With that turned on, the charset of
a message you're replying to wouldn't affect the charset of your reply.

Comment 3

[Dzmitry Piatrushenia]

When composing a new message, Mozilla should always use the default
(user-selected) encoding even when it is not needed.

When replying to a message with a different encoding, Mozilla already has
settings "Always use default charset in replies". The problem is not in reply,
but in composition

Comment 4

[Juha Luoma]

Using Mozilla 1.7 on Windows. I have ISO-8859-15 as default charset and I do not
have "Always use default charset in replies" set.

Then I reply to a mail written in ISO-8859-1. My reply contains euro symbol. I
would expect charest in my reply then to be ISO-8859-15 but Mozilla selects
windows-1252. Why is that?

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 53147 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

I suggest INVALID, since the behavior is correct. There is no reason to declare anything but US-ASCII if it is true.

pi

Comment 7

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 8

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"