Version: 1.8 (using KDE KDE 3.4.0) Installed from: SuSE RPMs Compiler: gcc 3.3.4 OS: Linux Using Reply to mailing list, responding to an ASCII-only mailing list message, Kmail sets the charset to ISO-8859-6 (arabic) for no apparent reason. Settings for composer charset lists the following: us-ascii iso-8859-1 iso-8859-1 (local) utf-8 Keep original charset was checked (but messages being responded to were in the deafult us-ascii charset). I have since unchecked that option. environment LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 Messages are archived at (unfortunately, you cannot directly see the message headers from the HTML archive): http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg34773.html http://www.imc.org/ietf-smtp/mail-archive/msg01664.html In each case, Kmail generated the following Content-Type header field: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-6"
Bug confirmed on slackware-current, KMail 1.8. When replying to a multipart MIME message generated my Microsoft Outlook Express 6, original content had charset="iso-8859-1", but reply was assigned charset="iso-8859-6". Problem only occurs with "Keep original charset" option ticked.
I'm seeing this on Debian unstable with the pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org packages. It only happens with the keep original charset option, as Ken said. It seems to happen anytime I reply to a MIME message which has iso-8859-1 as the charset. It gets converted to iso-8859-6 which is Arabic. Kmail doesn't render the Arabic any differently, but other mail readers correctly display the Arabic charset in right-to-left mode, which looks kind of funny. Possibly another bug, it also seems to *always* send my pgp signed messages as iso-8859-1, even when I put utf-8 above iso-8859-1 in my charset configuration.
I think bug 105014 is a dupe of this, but the information there is a bit more thorough than here. My own observations of this happening to me are that it happens when responding to messages from Outlook (the most recent occurrence for me was when the other person was using Outlook 2003). I am seeing it happen where the original message has charset us-ascii (different than comment #2 which says his original message was iso-8859-1). I can forward the emails in question to someone who is working on this if it would help, but would rather not post them here.
While looking for something else, I noticed a "Fallback character encoding" box in Configure -> Appearance -> Message Window. Guess what the default is -- right, "Arabic (iso-8859-6)". *Why* that's the default on a system with en locale, when it was added to kmail and why there was no "change me" dialog, why this is buried under appearance and message window rather than composer and charset (which is what is seems to affect), why us-ascii (in fact the default charset for the Internet Message format (RFCs 2045, 2046) isn't in the list of charsets are mysteries.
God damn it, I thought I'd scrubbed every panel of that damn configuration dialog. Well spotted. I will answer one of your "whys", it seems "Arabic (iso-8859-6)" is first in the alphabetically sorted list, so that'd be my guess why it's selected. It just happens to be the one on top of the list! Argh! I love you kmail but sometimes I just wanna ....
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
I'm having the same problem here, Arabic was default...
*** Bug 105014 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This issue should have been fixed with KMail from KDE > 4.1. Can you confirm please ?
Thank you for taking the time to file a bug report. KMail2 was released in 2011, and the entire code base went through significant changes. We are currently in the process of porting to Qt5 and KF5. It is unlikely that these bugs are still valid in KMail2. We welcome you to try out KMail 2 with the KDE 4.14 release and give your feedback.