323125 - German umlauts are displayed as "?" in Subjects

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Richard Stevens]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/417.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.8
Build Identifier: Version 1.5 (20051201) - German localization

I'm using an IMAP account and all mails containing German umlauts in the Subject are broken.

The first Umlaut in the subject and every character after that is displayed as a question mark. 

Example:
Correct: Testfälle
Error: Testf????

I'm not sure if this is relevant but Umlauts within the mailbody are displayed correctly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Receive Mail with German Umlaut in the Subject.

Comment 1

[Richard Stevens]

Attachment: Screenshot of the error. This is one partial line of the messagelist.

Comment 2

[zug_treno]

(In reply to comment #0)
> The first Umlaut in the subject and every character after that is displayed as
> a question mark. 

Duplicate of/related to bug 271619 or maybe bug 273381?

Comment 3

[Richard Stevens]

I just looked at the possible duplicates. They seem indeed similar. 

I did some further investigation. It seems the message is encoded in ISO-8859-1 even though there is no mentioning of a characterset anywhere in the mail. I figured it out by copying the message in binary mode directly from the Maildir on the server and opening it in a texteditor trying various encoding modes. I can rule out multibyte charsets as encoding.  

I'm accessing the same server/imap account with thunderbird on Windows and the issue doesn't come up at all.

On OSX, all messages containing German Umlauts in the subject show like I originally described. It's not an issue with a specific broken message.

If there is any further investigation I can do to help and clarify, please let me know.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

The headers are not assumed to follow the charset specified in the message, 
even if there is one; they are supposed to be "MIME-encoded" (per RFC 2047) if they contain any non-ASCII character.  TB provides a fallbacks: each folder has its own default charset, which is used for displaying unspecified headers as well as unspecified message bodies.  If you're getting German mail, the 
intended charset is like either ISO-8859-1 (or the very similar ISO-8859-15) or UTF-8.

Right-click on the folder, select Properties, and check the charset.  If it's UTF-8, change it to ISO-8859-1, or vice versa; if that fixes the display for those messages, then this bug is invalid.

Comment 5

[Richard Stevens]

Mike, your analysis is correct. The subjects of the mails in question are not Mime encoded. My folder setting was UTF-8. Changing it to Latin1 fixes the display problem.

I'll mark the report as invalid. 

Thanks!