RE: help: chinese hanzi characters in webmail

Solution:

Squirrelmail appears to have two methods of setting character set
preferences.  

The most obvious, in the config.php file, ships with iso-8559-1 as the
default character set.  Changing this setting to gb2312 in the config.php
file does not fix the problem.

The second and less-obvious method is successful.  On a per-client basis,
Squirrelmail allows an encoding setting to be changed under Options/Display
Settings/General Display Options/Language.  A pull-down menu gives a long
list of languages, including "Simplified Chinese".

Making this change switches the user interface to Simplified Chinese (as one
would expect with for a "Display Option").  What this setting also does is
that it correctly switches the encoding "Character-Type" value in outbound
email headers to gb2312.

This means that Outlook correctly switches received messages to gb2312
Character-Type, and the Hanzi displays properly.

Note that no change needs to be made in the browser's encoding preferences
(although making the change to gb2312 user interface obviously requires the
browser to be set to a compatible character set so that the UI is readable.
But this should be automatic.)

Thanks to Ken Wong and Matteo.

/src



> -----Original Message-----
> From: blug-tech-bounces-+qp3TudyjKPvfBIPTTProkB+6BGkLq7r@public.gmane.org [mailto:blug-tech-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Simon Cousins
> Sent: Friday, 23 April 2004 2:19 PM
> To: 'Beijing LUG technical questions and assistance - Publicly posted'
> Subject: RE: [blug-tech] help: chinese hanzi characters in webmail
> 
> 
> > Simon,
> >
> > here's the trouble maker. In the headers from your squirrelmail webmail:
> >
> > Content-Type: text/plain;
> >   charset=iso-8859-1
> >
> > It comes out as garbage on my system too, because of that. A properly
> > configured mailer should produce:
> >
> > Content-Type: text/plain;
> >   charset="gb2312"
> >
> > That's produced by outlook. You need to change the default encoding on
> > Squirrelmail.
> 
> 
> Brilliant, Ken, thank you!  You know I was just having a fish burger in
> the
> McDonalds with Matteo and we struck on the idea of bad encoding info in
> the
> headers.  Bingo!  The morphogenetic field is working well today, my
> friend.
> 
> Spamassassin doesn't allow a per-user setting for any character encoding.
> I'll grep the conf files and report back to the list.
> 
> /src
> 
> 
> 
> > On Friday 23 April 2004 13:40, simonc wrote:
> > > Hi Ken,
> > >
> > > This is sent from Squirrelmail on Firefox with GB2312 encoding
> > > effective:
> > >
> > > È«ÌåͬÈÊ£º
> > > 4ÔÂ22ÈÕÓÐÏûÏ¢±¨µÀ£¬±±¾©•¢ÏÖ1Ãû•ÇµäÒÉËƲ¡ÈË¡£
> > >
> > > Simon.
> 
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