SUMMARY encoding changes when replying, wrong special character (in french) STEPS TO REPRODUCE encoding set to "auto" receiving message with french special character displayed correctly e.g. être, payé, société replying to message "R" OBSERVED RESULT in reply message: être, payé, Société EXPECTED RESULT same special character as in recieved message SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux 5.13.0-1-default Tumbleweed 20210710 KDE Plasma Version: 5.22.3 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.83.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
new details: I wrote a test mail to myself using é è ê û ô à ... in the reply these special french character are perfectly quoted. The problematic messages come from gmail accounts (message OK, but french character lost in the reply). They have a heavy header and I just compared the charset lines which are slightly different: gmail: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable kmail: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" No idea if this is the explication. Also setting encoding to UTF-8 manually (Options/Encoding/Unicode/UTF-8) does not fix the reply. And there are no french character problems in the reply with non-gmail messages.
the problem did not occur on another installation: de-selecting Settings/Configure KMail/Composer/Charset/Keep original charset when replying... fixed the problem.