RFC2047 Subjects

[Ed Blackman]

I've been seeing more and more "=?US-ASCII?Q?...?=" in email Subject lines lately. At first, it was all from a particular (and not very technically apt) source, and I assumed that they were doing something wrong, and more or less ignored it. But as I get emails from more and more sources, it's harder to assume they're all getting it wrong.

Subject: 
=?US-ASCII?Q?Intrade_Gazette:_John_Thune_for_President?_Roger_Clemens_heads_to_court._Will_the_'Ground_Zero_Mosque'_get_built??=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;
        charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable







$ mutt -v
Mutt 1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14)
Copyright (C) 1996-2007 Michael R. Elkins and others.
Mutt comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `mutt -vv'.
Mutt is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `mutt -vv' for details.

System: Linux 2.6.24-28-generic (i686)
ncurses: ncurses 5.6.20071124 (compiled with 5.6)
libidn: 1.1 (compiled with 1.1)

Compile options:
-DOMAIN
+DEBUG
-HOMESPOOL  +USE_SETGID  +USE_DOTLOCK  +DL_STANDALONE
+USE_FCNTL  -USE_FLOCK

+HAVE_REGCOMP  -USE_GNU_REGEX
+HAVE_COLOR  +HAVE_START_COLOR  +HAVE_TYPEAHEAD  +HAVE_BKGDSET
+HAVE_CURS_SET  +HAVE_META  +HAVE_RESIZETERM

-EXACT_ADDRESS  -SUN_ATTACHMENT

+HAVE_ICONV  -ICONV_NONTRANS  +HAVE_LIBIDN  +HAVE_GETSID  +USE_HCACHE
ISPELL="/usr/bin/ispell"
SENDMAIL="/usr/sbin/sendmail"
MAILPATH="/var/mail"
PKGDATADIR="/usr/share/mutt"
SYSCONFDIR="/etc"
EXECSHELL="/bin/sh"
MIXMASTER="mixmaster"
To contact the developers, please mail to <mutt-...@mutt.org>.
To report a bug, please visit http://bugs.mutt.org/.

patch-1.5.13.cd.ifdef.2
patch-1.5.13.cd.purge_message.3.4
patch-1.5.13.nt+ab.xtitles.4
patch-1.5.4.vk.pgp_verbose_mime
patch-1.5.6.dw.maildir-mtime.1
patch-1.5.8.hr.sensible_browser_position.3

Ed

I did a little searching and found that RFC 2047 is the technical specification for these encoded strings, and that mutt does have RFC 2047 support. However, none of the muttrc entries that mention it seem relevant to RFC 2047 decoding for the index and pager display of the Subject line. Here are the relevant headers from an email that isn't displayed correctly: I would expect to see "Intrade Gazette: "... in the index and pager, instead of "=?US-ASCII?Q?Intrade_Gazette:_"... Thinking that it might be a charset issue, I tried "charset-hook US-ASCII ISO-8859-1", but that did not change the display. I'm using mutt from Ubunty hardy (8.04.4), with "LANG=en_US.UTF-8". "mutt -v" output follows: hcache backend: GDBM version 1.8.3. 10/15/2002 (built Jun 15 2006 21:19:27) +USE_POP +USE_IMAP +USE_SMTP -USE_GSS -USE_SSL_OPENSSL +USE_SSL_GNUTLS +USE_SASL +HAVE_GETADDRINFO +CRYPT_BACKEND_CLASSIC_PGP +CRYPT_BACKEND_CLASSIC_SMIME -CRYPT_BACKEND_GPGME +ENABLE_NLS -LOCALES_HACK +COMPRESSED +HAVE_WC_FUNCS +HAVE_LANGINFO_CODESET +HAVE_LANGINFO_YESEXPR

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