802685 - Encoding issue appears only in title bar of Compose window

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[WBT]

Attachment: screenshot

See screenshot attached.

Comment 1

[WBT]

That bug report page was accidentally submitted before it was ready.  
I am forwarding a plaintext message and see encoding information in the title bar, when that is not part of the subject of the message, not behavior observed with other messages that I'm composing, and not interpretable by the average user (who doesn't know about various alternative encodings).  

I'm not sure if this is related to Bug 597369 or not.

Comment 2

[WBT]

OK, this is definitely a different bug than I thought.

The message in this screenshot (with a bit of introductory text added), was received as having a blank body and my local copy of the message, when I try to view it, also shows a completely blank body.
When I Save a copy in Drafts, and look at it there, it looks completely blank - even when I actually still have the message open in the Compose window and can see that it's not blank.

The fix is that in the Compose window one needs to go to Options (not Format) and then Character Encoding (again, not Format), and then pick something sensible (in my case, Western (ISO-8859-1)).  Then the encoding indicator goes away, when you save to drafts you can see the message, and when it's sent the message is readable.  

The bug is probably more an issue about how to handle that encoding.  Putting the string " - UNKNOWN-8BIT" in the title bar as the only indication of a character encoding issue, is a bad idea.  It should be clearer that there is an issue and it should be clear what to do about it, before an e-mail is stored and sent as blank.  Also, most people don't know about the presence or significance of multiple encoding options, so any dialogue or UI should account for that.