282746 - Mail message doesn't display Outlook Express HTML message correctly

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[John T]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050212
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050212

Using 1.7.3 on Win98, the following message was totally unreadable, with a lot
of null-character boxes, in the message window. I tried the nightly version from
about a week ago, and am pasting the following excerpt from the message window:
ÿþ< ! D O C T Y P E H T M L P U B L I C " - / / W 3 C / / D T D H T M L 4 . 0 T
r a n s i t i o n a l / / E N " > < H T M L > < H E A D > < M E T A c o n t e n
t = " t e x t / h t m l ; c h a r s e t = u n i c o d e " h t t p - e q u i v =
C o n t e n t - T y p e > < M E T A c o n t e n t =

The source window's message portion shows this:
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

=FF=FE<=00!=00D=00O=00C=00T=00Y=00P=00E=00 =00H=00T=00M=00L=00 =
=00P=00U=00B=00L=00I=00C=00 =
=00"=00-=00/=00/=00W=003=00C=00/=00/=00D=00T=00D=00 =00H=00T=00M=00L=00 =
=004=00.=000=00 = 


The message was produced with Outlook Express 5. I started having this this
problem in a discussion group, and haven't heard of any others reporting a
readability problem. I have no idea whether the sender, server or the Mozilla
I'm running is producing the problem.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Mozilla 
2. Load a mail message from a certain person dated 2-17-2005 or later
3. 

Actual Results:  
The message is displayed incorrectly, as shown above.

Expected Results:  
The message appears to be HTML, so a readable HTML-format message with colors,
fonts, etc should have been displayed.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

The content appears to have been written in 16-bit Unicode (as quoted-printable, 
which part looks OK), so the charset of "iso-8859-1" is not correct.  I fudged a 
message using the data you posted, and it displays as expected if the charset is 
changed to UTF-16.  You can try overriding it yourself (View | Character 
Encoding) to see if the message becomes readable.

Do you know what version of windows the sender of the message is using 
(including any language packs)?  I wonder if there's a setting in OE (or 
Windows) to control the format of the output.

There really isn't anything that Mozilla can do about this, since the charset 
quite clearly mismatches the data.  => Invalid

Comment 2

[Jungshik Shin]

It's just amazing some people send over the internet such a monster..