208917 - Mail Client has to remember last used encoding

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Internationalization, enhancement)

Description

[a_ber]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

For read messages it will be better for mail client to use last used (by user
when reading this mail) encoding instead of the default/written in this mail (as
it is, for example, in Outlook Express). The idea is if by some reason the
encoding is not correct, user will fix it and read the mail and it will be the
last encoding used used in the mail. The next time the mail will be shown him
already in correct encoding.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Shoshannah Forbes]

IMO, it is not good to change the encoding of diffrent email which their
encodings are declared.

When I change an email's encoding manually, it means that that *specific* email
has wrong encoding. At lest for me, it does not mean that all the other emails
have a wrong encoding (or the same encoding for that matter).

I subscribe to a mailing list in Hebrew, where some of the email is sent as
windows-1255, some as iso-8859-8, some as iso-8859-8-i, some as unicode, and
some is Hebrew marked incorrectly as "western".

Assuming that I fix the "western" email to windows-1255. The next email in line
is unicode iso-8859-8 and properly marked so- then using windows-1255 will brake
the display of that email, and I will end up changing encoding *more* then the
current situation.

On the other hand, haveing the encoding change to email *from a specific sender*
"stick", does sound like a usefull idea, as the badly makred email usally comes
from the same people over and over again.

Comment 2

[a_ber]

The suggestion was to store the last used encoding for _every__specific__e-mail_.
(e.g. in specific field in its header). In this case the search for right
encoding for every e-mail will be stored for it.

I suppose that the implementation of default encoding for specific sender will
be more complex, becuase the system has to look for it entead of be memoryless
(encoding of each mail depends only on this mail itself).

The storing of corrected encoding (if it was changed) in the e-mail itself helps
also for IMAP accounts, which means that encoding has to be changed at most once
per mail.

Comment 3

[Prognathous]

If I understand the current mechanism, Mozilla first checks the encoding
specified by the mail headers. If it can't find any, it uses Auto-Detect (as
long as it's On).  If AD is Off, it uses the default encoding that is specified
in the user's preferences.

Now, which part of this mechanism would you like to modify, and with what logic?

Prog.

Comment 4

[Jungshik Shin]

re comment #3:
THere's also the default charset of each mail folder. That has a higher priority
than the default mail display charset.  Put your mouse on a mail folder and
press the right mouse button and choose 'properties'.

If I understand correctly, what a_ber want is sorta 'persistent' charset for
_each_ message read. Say, you read message A and have to override the charset
specified in it because it ismislabelled. Next time you read the same message A
again, you don't want to repeat the override. Instead, you want the charset you
'forced' upon it to be remembered and used without your intervention. 

This is a valid enhancement request so I'm confirming it.