Encoding problem after using GMail with IMAP instead of POP

Question

Level 1

0 points

Encoding problem after using GMail with IMAP instead of POP

I got emails in Chinese incorrectly displayed after upgrading to Leopard + using IMAP to connect GMail. Sure it's not the emails' problems, as I can have them all right in GMail. They were fine b4 when I used POP.

Symptoms:
- Chinese email don't display correctly
- Changing to the right encoding (Big5) won't help, actually the emails appear all the same whichever encoding I choose.
- Switching to Chinese interface won't help.

Screenshot: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2256/1859274122a0eeac3af7o.png

Mail version: 3.0 (912.1/912)
System Version: Mac OS X 10.5 (9A581)

Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 4, 2007 9:31 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 4, 2007 11:00 AM in response to Edward HYH

I have occasionally had that problem with different non-Western encodings, but I have not found any pattern. Indeed, I have seen two mails from the same sender and presumably the same mail-application, where one displays fine, and the other one is garbled.

Do you know if all your senders use the same application?

Are all mails without exception garbled?

Reply

Answer 2

Edward HYH Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 6, 2007 10:48 AM in response to SermoDaturCunctis

Oh you remind me that, only mails forwarded from my school account (which display fine in the school web mail and gmail) are garbled.
And strangely, the garbled mails have correctly displayed subjects.

Reply

Answer 3

Nov 6, 2007 1:01 PM in response to Edward HYH

Just out of curiosity, did you check the raw source (View > Message > Raw Source) to see if the encoding was set there?

My guess is that the encoding is set but that it is something different from Big5. Google's web UI can probably override the bad encoding, but Mail.app thinks that it is not cricket to change a given encoding. Perhaps.

Reply

Answer 4

Edward HYH Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 8, 2007 5:05 AM in response to SermoDaturCunctis

Yup see the attached screenshot above.
The emails have the right encoding tag. I checked the gmail discussion group, it seems to be the problem of gmail's IMAP, it sorts of re-encode the email. So I guess I shall switch to POP for now.

Reply

Answer 5

Nov 13, 2007 11:59 PM in response to Edward HYH

Silly but working fix in some of my mails is to view the mail as Plain text. Then it appears correct. Sometimes.

Reply

Answer 6

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,336 points

Nov 14, 2007 5:47 AM in response to Edward HYH

Yup see the attached screenshot above.
The emails have the right encoding tag. I checked the gmail discussion group, it seems to be the problem of gmail's IMAP, it sorts of re-encode the email.

Question marks like that usually mean that somewhere on the way to you the message has been converted to Latin-1. There is no way to recover the actual text when that happens.

Reply

Answer 7

Edward HYH Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 14, 2007 11:12 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thx for telling me that. So it's true that GMail's IMAP re-encodes messages.

Reply

Answer 8

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,336 points

Nov 14, 2007 11:44 AM in response to Edward HYH

It seems to be a "known issue".

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs

Reply