341061 - Firefox data output to email application (e.g. Outlook Express) does not handle non-english characters

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel J.M. Guibord]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

With Firefox (and Netscape too), if you click on an email address in a webpage, and your email application is Outlook Express (and quite possibly othres too) AND the coded "subject line" (if part of the "mailto" coding) contains characters that are not part of the English alphabet, such as "é" or "à", these characters do not reproduced properly in the subject line. They are converted to "é" and other such character combinations.

Thanks,

Dan Guibord

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.guibord.com/french/careers/index.html
2. Click on "Faites-nous parvenir votre CV"
Actual Results:  
"Carrieres chez les Services de rédaction technique Guibord"

Expected Results:  
"Carrieres chez les Services de rédaction technique Guibord"

The problem is NOT with Outlook Express, because the problem does NOT occur with Internet Explorer. In my opinion, the problem is in the way that Firefox passes the non-english characters, contained in the subject line, to the email application.

Comment 1

[Ralf Vitasek]

when i use thunderbird as mail-client this works as well. its just outlook express that doesnt seem to like the data it gets from FF.

but when you follow the specs you're supposed to encode your text properly anyway. so i'd advice you fix your code.

change:
 document.write("Carrieres chez les Services de rédaction technique Guibord");
to:
  document.write(escape("Carrieres chez les Services de rédaction technique Guibord"));

and you'll can be sure it'll work everywhere without relying on some autodetection fallbacks on the mail-client side.