Re: Garbled display of UTF-8 encoded mails

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

Sven Joachim wrote:
>> during the last weeks I encountered a problem viewing articles (mainly
>> mails) with non-ASCII characters, e.g. a German Umlaut "Ü" is displayed
>> as an octal digit, \334.  This happens only if the message is encoded
>> like this:
>>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

It seems to be due to a bug in sender's mailer.

(encode-coding-string "Ü" 'utf-8) => "\303\234"
(encode-coding-string "Ü" 'iso-8859-1) => "\334"

So the Content-Type header should have been labeled with iso-8859-1,
not utf-8.  If you often face such mails, there's a handy workaround.
Try adding something like the following to your ~/.gnus.el file:

(setq gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist
      '((0 . undecided)
	(1 . iso-8859-1)
	(2 . windows-1252)
	(3 . utf-8)))

Then you can type `1 g' in the summary buffer to decode an article
by decoding by iso-8859-1 forcibly no matter what the charset the
Content-Type header says.

Cf. (info "(gnus)Paging the Article")

>> It does not happen with charset=iso-8859-1 or Content-Transfer-Encoding:
>> quoted-printable (thus you cannot reproduce it with articles from
>> Gmane).  Any idea what might have caused this?

> I bisected the problem and found out that commit bda3e8962a is the
> culprit:

> commit bda3e8962af0aee90144c3ae8c5360aa4c106d94
> Author: Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>
> Date:   Fri May 7 06:34:41 2010 +0000

I tried old Gnus of Apr. 2010 but found no difference.