Comments on the non-local ones:
- cyrus-8bit-2.3.3.diff
Was it not the position held by CMU in the last five years or so that one
such patch would *have* do to it properly and re-encode the header to some
default charset, in order not to corrupt the store with lack of charset
information (for searches) ?
Or am I getting completely confused, here?
I think having this as an *option* is perfectly reasonable. There are
already other imapd options like rfc2046_strict and rfc3028_strict that
control some strictness of RFC behaviour.
In this case it seems to me the options are:
1. Reject the message - users hate loosing email just because it's not fully
RFC compliant, especially when "my other provider doesn't have a problem"
2. Replace with X/? - users hate mail being mangled and not being able to
read it, especially when "my other provider doesn't have a problem"
3. Accept the message and store as is, leave it up to the email client to
handle - This seems to be the 90% good enough that works well. Most clients
well display 8-bit data from the message headers in the same charset as the
message body, which generally "works"
4. Recode correctly in MIME encoding based on the message charset - Would be
great but:
a) Hard because what if it's a multipart/alternative message, and the
alternative parts have different charsets? What do recode the header as?
b) Some messages just don't have a charset at all (some Japanese clients
seems particularly bad at this), what to do then?
c) Some HTML messages only include the charset in the HTML as a <meta>
header. Do you parse the HTML?
I agree that this option is truly a hack, and technically the email is
non-RFC compliant so you can do whatever you want, but unfortunately out in
the real world I think a hack like this allows people to actually get their
email and should be provided. I'm sure quite a few sites already apply this
patch to their installations in some way (eg I think Simon's RPMs include
it?)
Rob
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