296233 - Investigate sending ascii-only mail with no charset specified

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

It looks like we don't send ASCII-only mail as ascii because OE failed to deal
with that (bug 247958).  Does the OE problem also arise if instead of explicitly
specifying us-ascii we specify no charset at all?  Per the relevant RFC, that
should be treated like us-ascii, and since the content will be all ASCII there
should be no ambiguities on the receiving side anyway.  But there's a chance the
OE actually treats the two differently as far as replying (the problem in bug
247958) goes.

If sending no charset doesn't break OE, I would suggest doing that and removing
the preference that bug 247958 introduced (or at least changing its default value).

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Havne't seen any other bugs about this, so I assume the current way works pretty well? Boris?

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

It depends on how you define "well".  I really hate getting the Chinese fonts' idea of Latin text as a reader just because the default encoding of the sender is Big5, even if the actual text is all ASCII...

There's also the fact that doing what this bug suggests, if feasible, would be closer to the relevant RFC than what we do now.