On 22 October 2012 11:18, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Tim:
Discouraged by who? It's supposedly *the* answer to email
Ed Greshko:
UFT-7 isn't widely used.... But if you want to use it go ahead.
You said it's discouraged. I've never seen any such comment. Where do you find that advice?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7#cite_note-0 http://www.imc.org/imcr-010.html "It should be noted that the Unicode Standard also defines the UTF-7 charset, which was intended for Internet mail. However, MIME is quite capable of carrying UTF-8, and UTF-8 is expected to be used in many protocols, not just Internet mail. Fortunately, very few vendors implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet mail."
Essentially it was never a great solution to the problem it was supposed to address (didn't really beat existing methods, UTF-8 in MIME generally turned out to be better). Still, whatever reader Marko is using should be able to handle it, if it is GMail then it's a bug in that.
On 10/22/2012 06:25 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
On 22 October 2012 11:18, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Tim:
Discouraged by who? It's supposedly *the* answer to email
Ed Greshko:
UFT-7 isn't widely used.... But if you want to use it go ahead.
You said it's discouraged. I've never seen any such comment. Where do you find that advice?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7#cite_note-0 http://www.imc.org/imcr-010.html "It should be noted that the Unicode Standard also defines the UTF-7 charset, which was intended for Internet mail. However, MIME is quite capable of carrying UTF-8, and UTF-8 is expected to be used in many protocols, not just Internet mail. Fortunately, very few vendors implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet mail."
Essentially it was never a great solution to the problem it was supposed to address (didn't really beat existing methods, UTF-8 in MIME generally turned out to be better). Still, whatever reader Marko is using should be able to handle it, if it is GMail then it's a bug in that.
And, taking email out of the equation, the UTF-7 doesn't display correctly within the Fedora Archives. So, anyone using special characters that need to be *encoded* in UTF-7 will appear "unreadable" in the archives. So, if you use = and _ , etc it will be garbage to most people. Not very friendly for users of the archive. IMHO.
So, if you use = and _ , etc it will be garbage to most people. Not very friendly for users of the archive. IMHO.
Those look fine in the archive, to me at least: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2012-October/425898.html
But your message didn't wrap in the archive at least to me.
On 10/22/2012 06:39 PM, Frank Murphy wrote:
So, if you use = and _ , etc it will be garbage to most people. Not very friendly for users of the archive. IMHO.
Those look fine in the archive, to me at least: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2012-October/425898.html
Of course they look fine. I send my message in UTF-8
But your message didn't wrap in the archive at least to me.
I have auto-wrap turned off.
On Monday, 22. October 2012. 11.25.04 Ian Malone wrote:
On 22 October 2012 11:18, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Tim:
Discouraged by who? It's supposedly *the* answer to email
Ed Greshko:
UFT-7 isn't widely used.... But if you want to use it go ahead.
You said it's discouraged. I've never seen any such comment. Where do you find that advice?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7#cite_note-0 http://www.imc.org/imcr-010.html "It should be noted that the Unicode Standard also defines the UTF-7 charset, which was intended for Internet mail. However, MIME is quite capable of carrying UTF-8, and UTF-8 is expected to be used in many protocols, not just Internet mail. Fortunately, very few vendors implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet mail."
Essentially it was never a great solution to the problem it was supposed to address (didn't really beat existing methods, UTF-8 in MIME generally turned out to be better). Still, whatever reader Marko is using should be able to handle it, if it is GMail then it's a bug in that.
I am using KMail (version 4.8.5 that seems to be current for F16). My gmail account is used only to transport mail, I almost never use gmail's web interface (it's just awful...). :-)
I looked around in the "set encoding" menu in KMail, but UTF-7 was not offered as a choice. UTF-8 and UTF-16 were, along with a whole bunch of others, but UTF-7 does not appear to be supported.
Maybe it's a bug, maybe it was ignored on purpose, maybe the devs just forgot about supporting a deprecated encoding system... Couldn't find out, google didn't find any relevant bug reports AFAICT.
But it doesn't matter much anyway. The bigger problem is the mailing list archives, as Ed pointed out. If I look at Tim's original post on the archives,
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2012-October/425826.html
one can see that the encoding isn't right. However, I can see that Firefox also does not offer UTF-7 as an encoding choice (and I bet none of the modern web browsers do), so anyone watching the archives will have trouble understanding Tim's e-mail...
Best, :-) Marko
On 10/22/12 09:52, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Monday, 22. October 2012. 11.25.04 Ian Malone wrote:
On 22 October 2012 11:18, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Tim:
Discouraged by who? It's supposedly *the* answer to email
Ed Greshko:
UFT-7 isn't widely used.... But if you want to use it go ahead.
You said it's discouraged. I've never seen any such comment. Where do you find that advice?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7#cite_note-0 http://www.imc.org/imcr-010.html "It should be noted that the Unicode Standard also defines the UTF-7 charset, which was intended for Internet mail. However, MIME is quite capable of carrying UTF-8, and UTF-8 is expected to be used in many protocols, not just Internet mail. Fortunately, very few vendors implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet mail."
Essentially it was never a great solution to the problem it was supposed to address (didn't really beat existing methods, UTF-8 in MIME generally turned out to be better). Still, whatever reader Marko is using should be able to handle it, if it is GMail then it's a bug in that.
I am using KMail (version 4.8.5 that seems to be current for F16). My gmail account is used only to transport mail, I almost never use gmail's web interface (it's just awful...). :-)
I looked around in the "set encoding" menu in KMail, but UTF-7 was not offered as a choice. UTF-8 and UTF-16 were, along with a whole bunch of others, but UTF-7 does not appear to be supported.
Maybe it's a bug, maybe it was ignored on purpose, maybe the devs just forgot about supporting a deprecated encoding system... Couldn't find out, google didn't find any relevant bug reports AFAICT.
But it doesn't matter much anyway. The bigger problem is the mailing list archives, as Ed pointed out. If I look at Tim's original post on the archives,
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2012-October/425826.html
one can see that the encoding isn't right. However, I can see that Firefox also does not offer UTF-7 as an encoding choice (and I bet none of the modern web browsers do), so anyone watching the archives will have trouble understanding Tim's e-mail...
Best, :-) Marko
It's interesting because in ThunderBird 16.0.1 on Fedora Rawhide an email that Tim sent thru shows this in his comments:
In the /etc/default/grub file, I added this line:
GRUB+AF8-GFXMODE+AD0-800x600
Then ran the +ACI-grub2-mkconfig+ACI command to regenerate the config file used
While the response to Tim's email (including the lines above) show them displayed as:
In the /etc/default/grub file, I added this line:
GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600
Then ran the "grub2-mkconfig" command to regenerate the config file used at boot time.
Which is the correct way for it to be displayed. So it doesn't look like Thunderbird 16.0.1 likes UTF-7 anymore than some other clients. I missed what the point of setting UTF-7 was in the first place but it seems to break more than it fixes.
Kevin
On Mon, 2012-10-22 at 11:27 -0500, Kevin Martin wrote:
in ThunderBird 16.0.1 on Fedora Rawhide an email that Tim sent thru shows this in his comments:
In the /etc/default/grub file, I added this line:
GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600
The above has been automatically corrected by my mail client when I hit reply. Kevin's quoted posting had erroneous additional characters in it, which appear due to Thunderbird not knowing how to decode UTF-7, so it showed the encoded character without any decoding.
I've changed my mail client's encoding configuration, some time ago, since people have found it didn't decode properly.
To re-write the instructions, which I'm sure were from another message thread, the line being added to the GRUB file should be two words separated by an underscore, equals, eight-hundred by six-hundred:
GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600
The UTF-7 encoding seemed to be encoding the underscore, and the equals signs. Which seems peculiar characters to have to encode, rather than send as-is, because they're part of 7-bit US-ASCII.
I missed what the point of setting UTF-7 was in the first place but it seems to break more than it fixes.
The point was *supposed* to be that it would pass through *some* servers, unmolested, because it was all 7-bit data, to start with. *Those* servers which think that they should transcode any 8-bit message that comes them into 7-bit. Of course, there are also servers that think that they should transcode 7-bit mail into more modern 8-bit mail, or something else.
In either case, they're allegedly being helpful, but the reality being somewhat different. Whenever you transcode there's a risk of an error occurring. And you make it even harder for the recipient to untangle the mess.
The point has been made, and I think proved, that the original idea of UTF-7 being a solution, doesn't work. *Helpful* servers may still transcode mail on the way through. And, even after all these years, plenty of software doesn't support UTF-7.
--------------------------
Anyway, after all this hijacking of my original message, had anybody else tried what I did to make Skype work? Not needed to? Had a different experience?
On 23 October 2012 09:27, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
To re-write the instructions, which I'm sure were from another message thread, the line being added to the GRUB file should be two words separated by an underscore, equals, eight-hundred by six-hundred:
GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600
The UTF-7 encoding seemed to be encoding the underscore, and the equals signs. Which seems peculiar characters to have to encode, rather than send as-is, because they're part of 7-bit US-ASCII.
In brief, UTF-7 attempts to represent unicode in a 7bit character set, this means some characters from a 7bit set need to be used for control sequences and have to be encoded. In practice only "+" really has to be, but all the 'optional direct characters' might be, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7. Contrast UTF-8 where all low-byte characters are 'un-encoded' and only high byte characters are used in the multi-byte codes.
Anyway, after all this hijacking of my original message, had anybody else tried what I did to make Skype work? Not needed to? Had a different experience?
Haven't used it in a while, will investigate later.
-
Ed Greshko -
Frank Murphy -
Ian Malone -
kevin martin -
Marko Vojinovic -
Tim