Ubuntu
evolution package

Problems with international characters in subject when sending to Microsoft Outlook

Bug #115844 reported by Santiago Erquicia
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Evolution
Fix Released
Medium
evolution (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Wishlist
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Binary package hint: evolution

I'm posting this bug here since I did try with upstream bugzilla but nobody seems to care.

I wrote an email with the following subject: "Proyecto USAID Paraguay - Análisis de situación". When the email is read in Microsoft Outlook, the subject shows up as "Proyecto USAID Paraguay - Análisis desituación" (there is a missing space before "situación").

Looking at the source code of the email I found that just after the word "de", there is a line break which might cause this problem. Here is the exact text:

Subject: Proyecto USAID Paraguay - =?ISO-8859-1?Q?An=E1lisis?= de
        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?situaci=F3n?=

The email subject shows up perfectly if you use Evolution or Gmail, but not under Microsoft Outlook.

Thunderbird generates an email with the following subject:

Subject: Proyecto USAID Paraguay - =?ISO-8859-1?Q?An=E1lisis_de_situa?=
 =?ISO-8859-1?Q?ci=F3n?=

From what I'm seeing in my emails, Mozilla Thunderbird keeps changing international characters to that format (is encode the right word for this?) after the first word that
has an accented letter. On the other hand, Microsoft Outlook, as well as Yahoo Mail, changes everything in the subject line if there is an accented word in it. It seems that evolution only "encodes" the words that have an accented letter.

I guess it's an Outlook bug, but it forced me to switch to Thunderbird given that most of my customers use Outlook and it doesn't look professional to "write" emails with orthography mistakes (even if they are not mine).

I hope that Ubuntu, since it's very focussed on making things work, can push for a fix to this interoperability problem, even if Evolution actually follows the spec.

Revision history for this message
Santiago Erquicia (santiago-erquicia-gmail) wrote :

I forgot to mention upstream bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=417000

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.

Changed in evolution:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Undecided → Low
status: Unconfirmed → Rejected
Revision history for this message
Santiago Erquicia (santiago-erquicia-gmail) wrote :

I'm not sure this is a duplicate of #15387.

The problem reported there is just because of the encoding of one character. This is about how evolution encodes the whole subject when there is an international character. Evolution just encodes the international character while other email clients encode the whole subject line or from the first word where there is an international character on.

At the same time, in the other email, the problem is how Evolution shows the subject, here is how Evolution generates the subject.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

marking unconfirmed. Do you have the bugzilla bug? We have thousand of desktop bugs open and the desktop team is small it's not likely that we work on this bug any time soon in a distribution specific way

Changed in evolution:
status: Rejected → Unconfirmed
Revision history for this message
Santiago Erquicia (santiago-erquicia-gmail) wrote :

The upstream bugzilla bug number is 417000 as mentioned in the first comment.

I know you are overloaded with bugs and other work. I really appreciate your time to answer about this. I think that if you can just add a comment to upstream's bug, it would at least make it go from UNCONFIRMED to CONFIRMED and someone might take a look at it.

The problem as I see it is that this might be a bug in Microsoft Outlook, but many of other email clients do encode subjects differently, even Thunderbird and all the emails sent by those clients show up perfectly in Outlook. I don't want to . Evolution is the only one that do encode the subject this way. The point is that if Novell wants to have Evolution used in enterprises they might pay more attention to this bug once it is CONFIRMED since they might not have seen this problem.

Thanks!!

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

I will not change the bug upstream since I don't confirm the bug and I'll not configure a window account to do it. There is thousand of bugs open upstreams, having them unconfirmed or not is quite the same, hackers get too many of them to reply to everything

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in evolution:
status: Unknown → Unconfirmed
Revision history for this message
C de-Avillez (hggdh2) wrote :

Santiago, could you please attach here the headers of such an email? You can, if you wish, clear out some of the fields, as long as you do not change the stating and ending of a line (for example, by taking out, or adding spaces). The point is continuing a line (e.g., the line break in the middle of the subject) is acceptable and fully in the standard if it follows some basic rules.

I wanted to check on the exact contents of the subject field.

Changed in evolution:
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Santiago Erquicia (santiago-erquicia-gmail) wrote :

I'm attaching an email written in Evolution and another one in Thunderbird. I have changed email addresses in both of them.

As you can see, the header lines are the same ones I posted on my original message.

Let me know if that helps of if you need more information.

Revision history for this message
Santiago Erquicia (santiago-erquicia-gmail) wrote :
Revision history for this message
C de-Avillez (hggdh2) wrote :

this seems to be a borderline condition when the subject line has to be split in multiple physical lines. I am still looking at it.

Revision history for this message
C de-Avillez (hggdh2) wrote :

I am confirming it. Comments upstream explain.

Changed in evolution:
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in evolution:
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
C de-Avillez (hggdh2) wrote :

This is actually a wish -- Evo is doing the right thing, and we now depend on someone upstream to have a go at it. So, marking as such.

Changed in evolution:
importance: Low → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
Santiago Erquicia (santiago-erquicia-gmail) wrote :

Upstream bug is resolved fixed, although I don't think it made into Evolution 2.22.1

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

thank you for the update, changing the bug to fix commited since that's fixed in the upstream svn now

Changed in evolution:
status: Confirmed → Fix Committed
Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in evolution:
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

the new version has been uploaded to intrepid

Changed in evolution:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
mrakolet (mrakolet) wrote :

I have version: Evolution 2.22.3.1 and still have this problem. One word in subject is encoding windows-1250 and next is encoding UTF-8

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in evolution:
importance: Unknown → Medium
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