[wp-hackers] 8bit ASCII characters in headers of comment-notification-mails

[Sebastian Herp]

Thank you, i have seen such headers and wondered what that means :-)

My MTA *is* up to date and it doesn't mess with correctly formed headers
(this mailing list is a perfect example). I can, of course, disable this
function, but i wanted to let somebody know that there is something
wrong with umlauts and such things in mailheaders ....

(It's not only about the subject, the from-header can have umlauts, too)

drDave wrote:

> Actually, this is not completely true afaik.
> If you check out RFCs 2047 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2047.html) and
> 2231, you will see that there is a mechanism allowing you to specify
> an encoding for your subject header. e.g.:
> =?iso-8859-1?Q?R=FCckantwort_?=
>
> This RFC is far from perfect, but it is essential, especially for
> countries where the whole writing system relies on non-ASCII characters.
> It can sometimes be a problem if your MTA messes with these headers
> and decode them instead of leaving that task up to the sole MUA... but
> that's not really the sender's fault. It means your MTA is somehow not
> up to date and should be fixed.
>
> I do not know if WP is respecting this RFC, if not it would indeed be
> a good idea to make sure that the subject header is thus encoded
> (probably UTF-8 would be a good choice) whenever sending mails from WP.
>
> HtH,