382886 - Character encoding for a message is not applied to its subject line.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 90584

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Panos]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.0 (20070326)

I do not know if this is intentional/necessary or not, but it does cause problems for messages not written in English.

Often the subject of a non-English, non-Unicode message is written in the same encoding as the message body. Selecting "View->Character Encoding->..." fixes the way the message content is displayed, but it does not effect the way the message's subject line is displayed above the message body or in the messages' summary pane.

Also Thunderbird does not remember the character encoding I select for a message, but this belongs in another bug report.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a message encoded in an 'exotic' encoding, for example the confirmation mail yahoo.gr sends to new users (greek character encoding).
2. Observe that at least the message subject line in the content pane is encoded wrongly.
3. Change the character encoding to, say, "Greek (Windows-1253)".
4. Navigate to another message and then back to (1).
Actual Results:  
At (2) the encoding of the subject line in both panes is wrong.
After (3) the subject line in the content pane is encoded properly. But the subject line in the message list pane remains in the wrong encoding.
After (4) Thunderbird seems to have 'forgotten' all the changes to the encoding.

To sum it up:
1. In the message list pane the encoding is always wrong.
2. In the message content pane the encoding is sometimes wrong (until you fix it manually)
3. Encoding changes are lost as soon as you navigate away.

Expected Results:  
Ideally, the subject line's encoding should be auto-detected along with the body's encoding.
If this is not possible, changes to the content's encoding should be reflected to the subject's encoding in *all* panes/windows.
Same for other header lines that may use a 'special' encoding.
Thunderbird should also remember the encoding last selected.