Re: Preferences window

[Albrecht Dreß <albrecht dress arcor de>]

Am 07.07.04 21:09 schrieb(en) Darko Obradovic:
> I think this pref isn't really important. Broken messages are rare and  
> it's not Balsa's duty to fix them (it's no reliable fix anyways),  
> replacing unknown characters with question marks sounds reasonable and  
> won't break anything.

**Please** don't remove this!! Of course you are right that the sender  
should not send broken messages, but reality is that they exist, and they  
are NOT rare. And I'm not talking about spam, btw. I get, for example, a  
schedule of a local cinema which is broken (and those guys are not clever  
enough to fix it), movie titles with lots of ? in them are a pain.

An other source are some mailers sending RFC 2440 encrypted messages (e.g.  
pgp4pine). They encrypt the message, build the ASCII armor, and then  
calculate the charset needed, which is always (surprise) us-ascii. Problem  
after decryption - see above! Again, these messages are not rare, and  
strictly speaking they are not even broken, as they comply with the RFC's,  
and '2440 doesn't deal with 8-bit chars...

Also keep in mind the IETF/RFC request to "be strict in what you send, but  
liberal in what you accept".

> So I removed the pref from the UI by now (see attached patch against  
> 2.0.18) and I'm willed to remove it cleanly from the backend as
> well, which will remove quite some overhead, but experience has shown  
> that most probably you won't like this, so I'm better asking first  
> before wasting my time. :)


		I AM STRONGLY OPPOSED TO THIS!!!


For the feature itself, see above. For the prefs, there has been a  
discussion a while ago about some "magic algorithm" written by Jeff to  
determine the charset of a broken message automagically. IIRC, the the  
conclusion has been that the algorithm is not bullet-proof, and that it  
needs a large amount of mem, so for the time being the prefs solution was  
the better one. In any case, **please** have a look at that discussion  
before removing this really extremely important feature!!

Cheers, Albrecht.


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