119813 - Make default encoding (for composition) a per-identity (account) option

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement)

Description

[Erich 'Ricky' Iseli]

Right now you can set the default encoding of a folder inside of an account. For
certain situations, this is a quite uncomfortable solution, since all mails
could require a specific encoding. And when composing a new message, you still
have to set the encoding manually, before you file it into a folder.

Timeless suggested to create a template with the needed encoding and request a
feature which could allow to define a template to be the standard when composing
mail.

The trouble is: I'm not really using templates... And the solution with
templates, even if nifty, is not really straight forward either... What do you
guys think?

Comment 1

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

Reporter, you should distinguish folder encoding (which is 
display encoding default) from the compose encoding (which is 
send encoding default).

1. You can set the folder viewing default with:

Edit | Prefs | Mail & Newsgroup | Message Display | Languages

which will be used to set the encoding for all newly created
folders.

2. You can set the per folder encoding with: 

Edit | Properties

** This will change each folder's default encoding.

3. You can set the default encoding for the outgoing messages
   with:

Edit | Prefs | Mail & Newsgroup | Message Composition | Composing
  Messages | Character Coding

Please explain which function does not work for you well.


 

Comment 2

[Erich 'Ricky' Iseli]

Ok, imagine you have business with Chinese people and Russian people. You have a
special account for each language. However, your primary language is English.

So of course you want by default to send your mail by default with the encoding
of iso-8859-1 or similar. But
1) all folders created within the Russian account should have a russian encoding
2) all newly created messages within the Russian e-mail address should have the
russian encoding.
3) 1 and 2 also apply for the chinese account.

Now, what I need to do is manually change the encoding of every single folder
within the Russian and Chinese accounts. And manually set the message encoding
before sending a message. Because I always get the alert "The message you
composed contains characters not found in the selected Character Coding, so your
message may become UNREADABLE after you send or save it..."

I hope this is clearer.

Comment 3

[Brant Gurganus]

[RFE] is deprecated in favor of severity: enhancement.  They have the same meaning.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 145620 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Andy Pepperdine]

It's not just the language, there are many things that should, IMO, be related to an identity:
 The language to spell check against (think bilingual writer)
 The language and the string to place above a reply (X wrote, etc) (think multilingual correspondence) The header may be in the addressee's language which may be different from the text you write in the reply.
 The encoding to use (think UTF-8 or ASCII for Chinese or English)
 The font to use (think Arial for both English and German, but not Chinese)
 The signature file to use (think different jobs by one person)
 Whether a message is signed (think personal v business)
 What column lines are wrapped at
 
All of this might be on a single e-mail address with a single inbox.

It is almost worth thinking that instead of identities, it ought to be possible to create separate accounts but with a shared e-mail address.

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

We're UTF-8 only since years now.