"Contact this user" feature uses MIME header encoding in the signature

[William Grant]

Emails from the "Contact this user" feature use the MIME encoded-word encoding in the signature of the email, to encode non-ASCII person display names. You can't use encoded-words in the message body.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Barry, can you make a judgement about this issue and an estimate of the cost to address it?

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

You can use encoded words if the MIME headers indicate the proper charset. When the person's display name has non-ascii characters in it, we should be using a charset of utf-8 and properly MIME encoding the body. Can you please confirm whether or not this happens?

Ideally, if you have an example email, with full headers, can you please attach it to this bug report?

[William Grant (wgrant)]

I couldn't find the original message, but it's trivially reproducible by getting somebody with a non-ASCII display name to email you. An example follows.

I can't see anywhere in the RFCs that encoded-words are allowed in a MIME body - their definition, RFC2047, only applies to certain parts of the headers of messages and MIME parts. Perhaps you should be using a quoted-printable Content-Transfer-Encoding instead?

==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: =?utf-8?q?William_Gr=C4=85nt?= <email address hidden>
To: =?utf-8?q?William_Gr=C4=85nt?= <email address hidden>
Subject: Test
Message-ID: <email address hidden>
X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: ContactViaWeb user
Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 22:04:40 -0000
Reply-To: =?utf-8?q?William_Gr=C4=85nt?= <email address hidden>
Sender: <email address hidden>
Errors-To: <email address hidden>
X-Generated-By: Launchpad (canonical.com); Revision="8036";
 Instance="launchpad-lazr.conf"
X-Launchpad-Hash: 718539e9b99b35dc36841a53f7f33c07d47ac0e3

Test
--
This message was sent from Launchpad by the user
=?utf-8?q?William_Gr=C4=85nt?= (https://edge.launchpad.net/~wgrant)
using the "Contact this user" link on your profile page.
For more information see
https://help.launchpad.net/YourAccount/ContactingPeople
==

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Barry. Can you take 30 minutes to learn what is going wrong and estimate the cost to fix it?

[William Grant (wgrant)]

See also bug #993148.