[Patch] New functions for libs/Mail.java and mvc/Mailer.java to set character-set and etc.

[nkmrshn]

I made a patch for libs/Mail.java and mvc/Mailer.java to enable to,

1. set subject character-set
2. set body character-set
3. set personal, so it can be like "foo <email address hidden>" and not just "<email address hidden>".
4. add header, like "Content-Transfer-Encoding : 7bit"

The reason why I started to make these, because some of the Japanese cell phone doesn't support UTF-8.

So, after I modified the libs/Mail.java and mvc/Mailer.java, I can write like this,

 public class Mails extends Mailer {

     public static void commented(Post post) {
         setSubject("........"); // Japanese multi-byte character in UTF-8
         setSubjectCharset("iso-2022-jp"); // subject will be encoded from UTF-8 to ISO-2022-JP.
         setBodyCharset("iso-2022-jp"); // also the body too.
         setPersonal("yabe"); // "yabe <email address hidden>"
         addHeader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "7bit"); // additional header, since ISO-2022-JP is 7bit
         addRecipient(post.author.email);
         send(post);
     }

 }

I hope that this proposal is useful.

[Nicolas Leroux (nicolas-lunatech)]

That is useful I think, thanks. I have a question. Why would the body charset be different from the subject charset?

The main sendmail method has too much parameters I believe, so it might be better to use a bean to construct the email, but that is another issue.

[nkmrshn (nkmrshn)]

Yes, usually the charset of subject and body are same, but I thought that maybe there is a circumstance that both are different. So, I wanted to leave the option to set different charset.

[Nicolas Leroux (nicolas-lunatech)]

I have committed something that allows to your character encoding for the whole message inspired by your patch.

I also committed the additional headers from your patch file. However, I did not commit the fix for the setPersonal as you can do that using the setFrom ie setFrom("Blabla <email address hidden>").

I preserved the old methods so the API is not changed (the API is Frozen for the 1.0 branch). I only need 2 extra tests to close this issue (one for the headers and one for the encoding). Maybe you can come up with a good test case?

I also start thinking that the sendMail as too many arguments so we might want to use a Mail object to leverage the calls ie :

Mail mail = new Mail();
mail.setFrom()
mail.addHeaders();

But that is an API change and that would be for the 1.1 branch. I also don't want to end up redoing the jakarta commons email (http://commons.apache.org/email/) so we will have to see how relevant that is.

[nkmrshn (nkmrshn)]

Thank you very much indeed.

I agree with you about the setPersonal, but when I looked at mvc/Mailer.java (r678) I found,

  public static void setPersonal(String personal)

I think you should remove this.

In the libs/Mail.java (r678, line 178),

  return sendMessage(buildMessage(from, replyTo, recipients, subject, body, alternate, contentType, attachments));

since you are not calling buildMessage with charset and headers variables, buildMessage function (line 210) will never called from mvc/Mailer.java. So, it should be,

  return sendMessage(buildMessage(from, replyTo, recipients, subject, body, alternate, contentType, charset, headers, attachments));

Also, addHeaders, in line 231 libs/Mail.java, MUST be after msg.setText, because setText will over write the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header. So even if I wrote,

 addHeader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "7bit");

the header will be, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable". Please move addHeaders to between line 280 and 281.

[Nicolas Leroux (nicolas-lunatech)]

Thanks for your work. I will change that asap.

[nkmrshn (nkmrshn)]

I confirmed the fix on r695. Thank you.