228133 - 8-bit 'Subject' not takes 'charset' from message body when displaying a message

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 90584

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Andrey Cherezov]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031209 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031209 Firebird/0.7+

If the message contains 8-bit content in the Subject field, it displayed using
default charset from user Preferences or settings for current account. But it
should be taken from a message body charset settings, because it is impossible
to set the 'universal' default charset for every language.




Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Sample message headers:

Subject: [some 8-bit plain text, not MIME-encoded, w/o charset, but actually
windows-1251, as in the message body]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=windows-1251
Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit

2. The default charset in Thunderbird settings is 'koi8-r' (most often used in
Cyrillic messages)


Actual Results:  
The message body displayed OK (according to 'Content-type: text/plain;
charset=windows-1251' header). But the subject displayed as it was 'koi8-r'
(wrong behavior).

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should get charset for Subject from the message body charset, if the
Subject doesn't contain its own explicit charset (MIME encoded Subject).

See also
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201037
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73202
(MailNews)

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=294046
(Thunderbird forum about that problem)

Comment 1

[Jungshik Shin]

See 

http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.6b/known-issues-int.html#mail



*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 90584 ***

Comment 2

[Max Alekseyev]

v.

Comment 3

[Andrey Cherezov]

From that URL: "If the message displayed lacks MIME charset information, the 
thread pane display obeys the default message display charset set via the 
folder properties dialog (set via the menu "Edit | Folder Properties ..."). 
Correctly setting this option to the charset most often used in the user's 
mail viewing helps avoid display problems of this type."

The message NOT lacks MIME charset information! As I posted above, there is 
charset in the header: "Content-type: text/plain; charset=windows-1251". And 
the message body displayed right. Thunderbird should use the _same_ charset 
for the headers. But it didn't :(

Setting the default charset of the folder to "most often used" not helps, 
because 55% of the headers have "koi8-r" charset, and 45% - "windows-1251". So 
we'll unable to read a half of the 8-bit headers. If Thunderbird will apply 
the rule "for 8bit headers use the same charset as for message body; and use 
default charset only if there no explicit charset in the message body or 
headers" - we will able to read 99.5% of the headers and messages w/o touching 
menu.

So, I agree with  Jungshik Shin 2003-10-23 16:09 :
"I realize that for Russians, it's rather important because multiple (legacy) 
character encodings (Windows-1251, KOI8-R  and ISO-8859-5 are used with more 
or less the same frequency." ISO-8859-5 is not used in the Russian/Cyrillic 
mail now, but Windows-1251 and KOI8-R used with the same frequency, and this 
is bad idea to select one of them as default. Most often charset is mentioned 
for a body, but just ignored by Mozilla/Thunderbird for a headers.

Any chance this problem will be solved in Thunderbird? This bug is the only 
reason why we still using Outlook.