Character Encoding in Evolution Exchange MAPI

Here is a screenshot.

When I send mails from evolution-mapi to other places it either comes out as all question marks or semi-legible with random insertions of '3D', 'C3' and '=20' in the body. I have lots of other problems with Evolution-mapi too but I'll look for other bug reports for those.

I've been waiting for Evolution to let me connect to Exchange and be stable for around 4 years now. It's kind of embarrassing that it's still this bad after all this time.

confirm - experience same problems.

Our server used to have OWA available and it worked like a charm (with a few hiccups). We recently lost our OWA access and I re-installed and MAPI seemed to be my only choice to connect to the server. It connects but the inconsistencies are miserable. I would be happy to run reports if they would be helpful to anyone.

Confirming of persisting issue.
I am on Ubuntu 9.10 but I compiled from source evolution-mapi-0.28.2 and gtkhtml-0.28.2. And find issue due respond on emails which has HTML format. My default settings for message body format is set to 'Plain-Text'. After processing through MAPI, I finding my sent message body all in chines hieroglyphs in sent folder same as recipients do. Problem is going away if I in respond email I am changing message format to HTML before sending it.
Looks like MAPI pars some tags in message body and missing something to recognize proper encoding or etc.

Sometime when I respond to messages which has message body as 'Plain Text', MAPI adds '=20' after <return> - seams like evolution adds some tag but MAPI recognize it as '=20' symbols.

Same thing here. evolution-mapi is almost unusable for me.

Is there any upstream bug for this? Every time it seems Evolution is close to being able to use Exchange, something else breaks.

I was happy to find exchange working on 10.04 alphas, but this makes it unusable again...back to owa..

I thought it was message character sets set wrong.. but it's hitting me as well... i can't reply to clients.. very annoying...

I'm having the same problem, I can't send html formatted messages l with this characters: "á à é è í ì ó ò ú ù" and if I try to send it in plain text the message is sent with extrange characters.

As I'm having this problem since 9.04 and while this bug is solved I'm using davmail that converts owa in IMAP and calendar in caldav.

Same problems.

Colleagues send mail that looks chinese.
I send html messages and colleagues (with Outlook) see the raw HTML (sometimes).

My outbox looks OK (sometimes) but if I try to view source I get mostly nothing although the message body may show raw HTML.

The whole thing is a joke, but I get by in this windows shop by mostly using text-only

Same here. Using 10.04 with evolution/exchange/mapi on an exchange 2007 server.

I get messages that look fine, but the reply I send is garbage - all in html code. The message looks normal before I send. This happens if I forward the html message to myself as well.

All I can do to avoid sending others HTML garbage code is use plain text.

Same problem. I use Ubuntu 10.04, Evolution exchange-mapi with a Exchange Server 2007.

Some messages that i receive have a empty body or a partial body with a [?] instead of piece of phrase.

The messages in plain text that i sent have garbage characters inside. I use Unicode in Evolution preferences.

I'm going to give davmail gateway and Thunderbird a try to see if it will work with my OWA and won't have these bugs that Evolution will. There aren't a lot of people doing this, so I'm not sure if it will really work.

I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS x64 and run into the same problem :(
I've also tried the Patch, which should fix this, but it did't help.

There is still in most of my e-mails a lot of text missing and only "[?]" shown.

Using ubuntu 10.04 (amd64) with Exchange 2007 sometimes when I reply an email, the external address receives it correctly, but my coworker (who I cc'ed) gets the raw HTML output. Encoding is set to UTF-8. My co-worker uses the same setup and seems to have this issue more then me. Can't reproduce this yet, to figure out whats the real issue, but hopefully there is a solution for this.

I have been using davmail gateway and thunderbird in my Exchange 2007 setup. Works great. Only very seldom do I get a message that adds a few extra characters but it doesn't replace anything important, just spaces. This seems to be related to the setup of the mail client on the other end, as it only happens when I forward something from someone who has a particular character set in their message.

I've been using the mapi version 0.30.3 in maveric and this still is a problem.

Upgraded from kubuntu 10.04 to 10.10 and it seems like every email I reply to now is gibberish. Didn't see the problem at all with 10.04. This makes evolution pretty much unusable for me.

Also upgraded to 10.10 and seeing same behaviour. "Compose Messaage" seems to ignore Charset Settings (i.e UTF-8).
When i look into Options->Character Encoding there is an new selectet entry "us-ascii" at the end.
When selecting UTF-8 mails are readable again ...

I'ts very anoying - i don't want to select the correct charset everytime i'll send a mail.

I noticed the same behaviour as filed by docsemmel above, after my upgrade to 10.10 yesterday (well after two people pointed me at the chinese characters in my mail). I noticed the sudden selection option for "us-ascii" at the bottom of the list in the character encoding that wasn't there before, and it is highlighted

I could fix the issue (well it looks like fixed) by changing the character encoding in the preferences:
Edit -> Preferences -> Composer Preferences
The odd thing is that it was still on UTF-8
Select something else (notice the absence of "us-ascii") and select UTF-8 again.

If I now compose a new message it is back on UTF-8 again at the Options -> Character Encoding and the "us-ascii" has disappeared. I guess during the upgrade the default has been changed to the absent us-ascii...

Cheers,
Bart

For me Bart's solution worked well. Now im able to send "non-chinese" again ....

thx

Bart's solution also worked for me (Ubuntu 10.10 upgraded from 10.04, Evolution with Mapi plugin, Exchange 2003)

Bart's solution also worked for me on Ubuntu 10.10 fresh install.

Thank you Bart, your solution works for me (Ubuntu 10.10 amd64 upgraded from 10.04, Evolution with Mapi plugin 0.30, Exchange 2007).

Thanks Bart!
Really strange behaviour. I'm noticing a lot of fairly unenglish names here. Would be interesting to know what languages people are using that experience this problem, I use swedish.

This bug was fixed in the package samba4 - 4.0.0~alpha15~git20110124.dfsg1-2ubuntu1

---------------
samba4 (4.0.0~alpha15~git20110124.dfsg1-2ubuntu1) natty; urgency=low

  * Add missing dependency on python-samba, required for testparm. LP: #641082
  * Add 03_wbclient.diff: Use system-packaged libwbclient.
   + Back out the new 'dc-info' command in wbinfo as libwbclient0 lacks some
     required symbols.
   + Solves unable to load libwbclient.so.0 errors. LP: #714344
  * Make sure /var/run/samba exists. LP: #646037
  * Add 04_setlocale.diff: Cherry-pick upstream fix to avoid setlocale() calls
    when used as a library. LP: #519025, #519025
  * Use system ldb headers so modules get built with the system ldb version.
 -- Jelmer Vernooij <email address hidden> Sun, 27 Feb 2011 18:06:26 +0100