Bug 106505

Summary: Non-english mail recieved from webmail is not displayed correctly
Product: [Applications] kmail Reporter: Roie Kerstein <roie.kerstein>
Component: generalAssignee: kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED NOT A BUG    
Severity: normal    
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Gentoo Packages   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Attachments: The mail as recieved. Created by "Save as...".

Description Roie Kerstein 2005-05-30 16:02:26 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.4.0)
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages
Compiler:          GCC 3.4.3 
OS:                Linux

When I recieve non-english mail from certain webmail site (so far I encountered this problem with Yahoo and Horde. GMail is OK, though), I see the mail as a sequence of HTML-encoded characters.
An example of a mail recently recieved is attached, and the display as it appears in kmail is following:
In other mail clients, such as balsa, it appears correctly, hence the problem is not with the webmail service.

&#1512;&#1493;&#1506;&#1497; &#1497;&#1511;&#1512;,

&#1513;&#1502;&#1512;&#1514;&#1497; &#1488;&#1514; &#1492;&#1511;&#1497;&#1513;&#1493;&#1512;&#1497;&#1501; &#1493;&#1506;&#1500; &#1499;&#1498; &#1512;&#1493;&#1489; &#1514;&#1493;&#1491;&#1493;&#1514; &#1500;&#1498;.

&#1489;&#1511;&#1513;&#1512; &#1500;&#1497;&#1497;&#1491;&#1497;&#1513;  -  &#1488;&#1504;&#1497; &#1497;&#1493;&#1491;&#1506;! &#1493;&#1488;&#1513;&#1502;&#1495; &#1488;&#1501; &#1514;&#1494;&#1499;&#1497;&#1512; &#1500;&#1497; &#1499;&#1513;&#1504;&#1497;&#1508;&#1490;&#1513;, &#1488;&#1513;&#1497;&#1512; &#1500;&#1498; &#1513;&#1497;&#1512; &#1497;&#1508;&#1492;&#1508;&#1492; &#1489;&#1497;&#1497;&#1491;&#1497;&#1513;.

&#1497;&#1493;&#1501; &#1504;&#1508;&#1500;&#1488; &#1488;&#1497;&#1513; &#1496;&#1493;&#1489; &#1493;&#1497;&#1511;&#1512;,

&#1496;&#1500;

                
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Comment 1 Roie Kerstein 2005-05-30 16:05:33 UTC 
Created attachment 11263 [details]
The mail as recieved. Created by "Save as...".
Comment 2 Andreas Gungl 2005-05-30 16:38:09 UTC 
Please try to temporarily switch on (in the menu) Folder -> Prefer HTML to 
plain text.
Comment 3 Roie Kerstein 2005-05-30 17:18:26 UTC 
It works, but I don't want this as a permanent solution.
I *really* don't prefer HTML over plain text.
Comment 4 Roie Kerstein 2005-05-30 17:20:25 UTC 
By the way, with this solution, hebrew text, which is a RTL language, is not right-aligned, although it should be.
Comment 5 Thiago Macieira 2005-06-01 01:21:07 UTC 
You've received an email with two parts: one is plain text and one is HTML.

The HTML part of the email is correct, as you can verify it yourself. The plain text part isn't. It doesn't contain text, just a bunch of ampersands, numbers and colons (like &1512;). That, of course, isn't text.

The mailer is broken. Fix the mailer. KMail isn't at fault here and will probably never handle such broken emails.

There is a proper way of escaping such characters, without the need to resort to HTML-entities in plain text. It's not a new thing either: RFCs 2045, 2046, 2047 and 2822 are quite a few years old already.
Comment 6 Thiago Macieira 2005-06-01 05:21:00 UTC 
In fact, I don't think the problem is with the mailer. It's more likely to be with the browser that was used to access the webmail in the first place.

I think Mozilla/Firefox has the bad habit of sending HTML entities for characters outside the form's character encoding.