utf-8 and iso-8859-7 e-mails cannot be shown correctly together in usermin web mail client

Submitted by web_support@web... on Wed, 12/28/2011 - 04:12 Pro Licensee

Hi,

I was the contributor of the last greek translation (07/06/2008).

I have a problem using usermin web mail client, for a long time now.

Here is the situation. For example greek gmail sends mail by default in UTF-8 encoding while the one of yahoo sends in ISO-8859-7. About half greek mail applications send mails in 2-byte UTF-8 encoding and the other half in 1-byte ISO-8859-7 encoding.

1) When I use usermin greek language (which is ISO-8859-7) : half e-mails in inbox subject listing do not show their subject well, and when I click on them to see their body, button labels in greek are not shown either. These are e-mails encoded in UTF-8.

So I converted my translations to UTF-8 as well and put them in the respective folders.

2) Trying again setting usermin to greek language in UTF-8 : now the other half e-mails do not show their subject well, and when I click on them, button labels are not shown. These are e-mails in ISO-8859-7.

3) Trying again setting usermin to english (iso-8859-1), or (UTF-8) : Half e-mails each time do not show their subjects well. However when I click on them buttons and body show up correctly (makes sense, since they are in eglish characters which show up correctly in both ISO-8859-7 and UTF-8)

So the best situation for me now is the 3rd, which however does not list all subjects well and ofcourse does not use usermin greek translation

I think to solve this problem, mail clients use always the same encoding for displaying e-mails for example UTF-8. Then they somehow detect the encoding of the incoming e-mail, and if it is not UTF-8, they convert the subject and the body characters to UTF-8 before showing.

From what I figured out usermin does not convert encodings but shows email body, changing html page encoding to the one of the incoming e-mail.

This is a major problem for me now since a lot of customers complain and redirect their e-mails to another web client.

I submit greek translations converted in both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-7 (sending e-mail to translations@webmin.com).

I hope to hearing from you soon!

Happy new year!

Status: 
Active

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 12/28/2011 - 23:29

The problem here is that usermin shows the email list using whatever character set is most common in your email, but if you have mixed subject lines some of them will show up wrong. Unfortunately a web page can only have a single character set ... so the proper fix is to convert character sets of subject lines before display.

Submitted by fuggi on Wed, 01/15/2014 - 05:41

Hello Jamie,
unfortunately, this problem (mixed German subject lines in ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8) is bothering me for about a year now. Why is it still not solved (I mean, the character sets converted according to output encoding)?

Regards,
fuggi

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 01/15/2014 - 15:23

Only due to the work involved - Usermin would need to know how to convert any character set to UTF-8, rather than letting the browser deal with it.

Submitted by fuggi on Wed, 01/15/2014 - 22:42

Is it really that much work? I mean, any other webmail application handles it properly (like RoundCube). Maybe there are some standard conversion functions provided in a library or there is a framework/library out there for Perl which does the work?