275021 - Unicode UTF-16 encoded messages are incorrectly displayed

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[jwq]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Macintosh/20041206)

Thunderbird version 1.0 (20041206); Mac OS X 10.3.5

 While testing messages with the character encoding set to UTF-16 I have noticed
a problem: if the UTF-16 composed message with Western characters is saved as a
draft then will be displayed as Chinese characters when the draft is reopened.

 This happens for both POP and IMAP accounts and in both cases the message
source shows the original characters. Re-saving the opened draft changes the
content of the body.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Compose a new message (File -> New -> Message)
2. If it isn't already there, add Unicode UTF-16 encoding to the Character
Encoding menu (Options -> Character Encoding -> Customize...)
3. Select Unicode encoding (Options -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-16)
4. Enter a recipient (e.g. your own email address)
5. Enter a subject (e.g. "UTF-16")
6. Enter "asdf" as the message body
7. [optional] Add some accented characters to the message body (e.g. option-a,
option-s, option-d, option-f)
8. Save the message as a draft
9. Open the saved draft
Actual Results:  
Chinese characters instead of "asdf" (or the optionally-entered accented
characters).

Expected Results:  
Saved draft message body should be displayed as it was entered.

Comment 1

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

My original reaction was that this was WONTFIX, or that we should block UTF-16
in outgoing mail, until I discovered RFC 1641, which specifies guidelines for
its use.

Comment 2

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

See also bug 236882

Comment 3

[Jungshik Shin]

This should be  WONTFIX. Our mailnews implementation is based on the assumption
that we don't have to deal with non-byte oriented character encodings. A lot of
SMTP/MIME experts are listed in the acknowledgement of RFC 1642 (which is out of
date), but I'm not sure if they gave any thought to implementation issues.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 5

[jwq]

Marking WONTFIX per comment #3.