Cron does send mails with wrong charset

This is fixed in debian in 3.0pl1-101. This version also has all the remaining changes in ubuntu, so it can be synced to ubuntu.

Fixed in Intrepid. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates if you would like to pursue
a fix in stable releases.

Thanks for your time.

9.10 server. it's still here
wer@wer-desktop:~$ locale
LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=ru_RU:ru:en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

but i have this header in mail
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968

i haven't acess to server now, but locale on my desktop and server equal

Still there with 10.10 server

Still with ANSI_X3.4-1968 instead of UTF-8 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
(Environment was set.)

Hi,

My Ubuntu 12.04 LTS servers seem to still send email with the wrong charset. They are configured in the french locale (/etc/default/locale:LANG="fr_FR.UTF-8"), and even the subject is unreadable. See this unattended-upgrade mail example:

--------
To: olive@xxxx
Subject: unattended-upgrades a retourné : xxx
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 06:26:53 +0200 (CEST)
From: root@xxxx

La mise à niveau automatique a retourné : True

Paquets mis à niveau :
 libqt4-dbus libqt4-declarative libqt4-designer libqt4-network
 libqt4-qt3support libqt4-script libqt4-sql libqt4-sql-mysql
 libqt4-xml libqt4-xmlpatterns libqtcore4 libqtgui4 qdbus

[other content stripped]
--------

Examining the mail source, it doesn't seem to have any content-encoding related header at all.

Same as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cron/+bug/1169160

@Josep: that bug report is unrelated. (Although it touches the same cron_default_mail_charset code.)

This issue is that:

(A) The cron daemon starts with no LANG (LANG=C)
(B) The processes start with the lang environment from /etc/default/locale (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)

Now the processes will print stuff like:

    $ rm abc
    rm: cannot remove ‘abc’ <-- note the non-ascii characters, because it has LANG=...UTF-8

But the mail with that error, will use:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968

instead of:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

That causes mail clients to get UTF-8 while it is told that it gets ASCII, resulting in a crappy reading experience.

A working fix for me is to add the LANG variable to /etc/init/cron.conf so the cron process gets

    # echo 'env LANG=en_US.UTF-8' > /etc/init/cron.override
    # stop cron; start cron

(Or alternately, the CONTENT_TYPE= setting in crontab as suggested in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=410057 )

I believe this bug got introduced by using upstart instead of the init script:
- the processes get the environment from /etc/pam.d/cron (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)
- cron gets the environment from /etc/default/locale BUT ONLY if it was started from /etc/init.d/cron. the upstart script does not load /etc/environment nor /etc/default/locale.

.. so .. that should probably mean that this is a ubuntu/cron bug, not an ubuntu/+source/cron bug.

And it first starts showing in Trusty because the tools use fancier tokens when unicode is available:

    ubuntu precise:
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove `/tmp/abc': No such file or directory

    ubuntu trusty
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove ‘/tmp/abc’: No such file or directory <-- see the fancy quotes here

Cheers,
Walter Doekes
OSSO B.V.

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty
# dpkg -l cron | grep ^ii
ii cron 3.0pl1-124ubuntu2

Ok. So this bug was really old and closed. Rereported as #1321227.