Subject field corruption

[Christian Schulte]

NOwlar wrote:

>I use Postfix 2.0.10 with TLS patch, cyrus-imapd 2.1.13, sasl 2.1.13
>The problem is as follow:
>When a message with russian charset characters (KOI8-R, WIN1251) in Subject
>field arrives or is moved into the Sent Items folders by Outlook Express,
>each russian character is replaced by an X (ex: Re: XXXX XXXX mazda 626
>XXXX). I happens only when the Subject field is without charaterset
>specification.
>
>I dumped mailboxes with cyrdump, the Xes are in.
>
>What can be wrog?
>
Maybe postfix can auto-convert these messages for you ? In sendmail you 
could do something like:

define(`confSEVEN_BIT_INPUT', `false')dnl
define(`confEIGHT_BIT_HANDLING', `mime')dnl
define(`confDEF_CHAR_SET', `iso-8859-15')dnl


but such a solution can produce quite ugly results if the message beeing 
autoconverted does not apply to the default charset in use. I stopped 
using such features because squatter stopped working for certain 
mailboxes in which auto-converted messages resided, I think. I would 
suggest setting reject8bit in imapd.conf to yes so that these 
non-standard-compliant messages get rejected. It is more a mta issue 
somehow than cyrus! Your mta delivers non-standard-compliant messages to 
cyrus and leaves the decision what to do with them to cyrus instead of 
just rejecting everything non-standarad-compliant. For me, the sender 
should get notice about the wrong behaving client and is the one to fix 
the problem on his side. I mainly had problems with messages coming from 
some webmail clients and I stopped caring about anybody who knows about 
the existence of e.g. php's mail function but does not know how to send 
messages with it correctly! If you see X in your messages cyrus just 
"corrected"  a  message the sender's client was not able to specify a 
character-set for correctly!

--Christian