Topic: user-vacation message format change from utf-8 to windows

[Amir Inbar]

Hello to all.

I am using user-vacation contrib in combination with fetchmail contrib on SME 7.4 server to automatically send reply message to people sending mails to an unwanted old address.
Here in Israel we use Hebrew as the primary language.
Most of the users use MS Outlook (usually 2003).
From searching Google i found out that outlook 2003 can NOT support utf8 encoding unless the user uses outlook's PST custom installed container.
Most of my installations are using IMAP so i hardly use outlook's pst files.
This causes messages in utf8 encoding to be scrambled and unreadable to outlook users until they manually change the encoding of the message.

Is there a way to change the encoding of the outgoing message sent by user-vacation contrib to be windows-1255 (Hebrew) ?

[stephen noble]

I don't know but, this would be a good place to start from
http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4389

[Amir Inbar]

Thank you snoble for trying to help.
It didn't work.

Any other ideas ?

[Amir Inbar]

Found the solution ! at least - temporary one.

Here is what i found :
I have used a web browser to write the vacation message at the contrib's panel on SME server manager.
This was producing scrambled text message that was unreadable by outlook - unless the user manually changed the encoding to UTF-8.
I have looked at the bug number 4389 as snoble sugested and adding :

Code: [Select]

+Content-type:text/plain;charset="windows-1255"                                     
did NOT solve the problem.

I have noticed that the contrib is actually building a new mail message at the user's home mail dir :

Code: [Select]

/home/e-smith/files/users/username/
called .vacation.msg

I've used winscp to login to that specific dir and opened the file for editing with the winscp built in editor.
I have replaced the scrambled text with Hebrew characters, saved the file and that's it ! Hebrew vacation messages started to work !

The only down-side i can see here is that this manual operation is needed every time a vacation message is changed or a new one is created.

[stephen noble]

from above
Don't report problems here - Please report bugs and potential bugs in the bug tracker

[Amir Inbar]

snoble,

I don't think this is a bug - the contrib works as expected.
Mozilla thunderbird for instance - works perfectly and shows the Hebrew characters exactly as it should without any manual change of encoding per message ! So actually, it works, but not in a certain cenario - the one i had described above.
My needs are little different - local charsets are allways a problem (so is ms outlook in that perticilar field) and most cases require "workarounds".
I've found a workaround to solve something that didn't work as I WANTED for MY case so i am sharing it with the comunity to help others save the time and trouble ...

[stephen noble]

Your helpfulness is appreciated, you have shown that the panel isn't saving the text in a format that works for you.

The reason for posting in the bugtracker is that is where problems, if possible get fixed, maybe this won't be, but that is where the developers lurk, not here.

If it's left in the forum, then users have to discover the problem, find and apply your workaround

[Amir Inbar]

Reported as advised :

http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4824