Thunderbird and Unicode -- How do you know you've enabled support?

rnturn · 02-20-2020, 05:31 PM

Since upgrading our mail server to Courier-IMAP 5.0.8, I occasionally receive popup messages telling me something like:

Code:

Message 152 appears to be a Unicode message and your E-mail reader did not enable Unicode support.

I've enabled Unicode in Thunderbird (v68.5.0) for both inbound and outbound messages in Preferences -> Display -> Formatting -> Fonts&Colors -> Advanced -> Text Encoding. I do not have T-bird set to allow messages to set their own fonts.

To try and figure out the message numbering, I've used:

Code:

$ cd ~/Maildir/cur
$ ls -1 | cat -n

but whatever numbering system is being used -- 0-based? 1-based? -- I can't see anything "odd" in whatever email file corresponds to the message number that Courier is squawking about. But... if I use:

Code:

$ cd ~/Maildir/cur
$ file * | cat -n | grep -i unicode

I see two messages listed as containing Unicode text: one from a credit card company [1] and another one that I sent to myself (a quick "Here's that URL" note sent from my laptop one night while surfing for documentation) but, alas, none of the message numbers corresponded to what was in any of the popup notifications. (I rather assumed that those numbers had something to do with the position of the email in my Inbox but apparently that's not true.) I am able to open these two emails so these messages are, at least, accessible within T-bird. When viewing those two emails using "View Source" I can see that one of the subject lines has a UTF-8 string ("=?UTF-8 blah blah ?=") though the other is plain text.

Questions:

Am I misunderstanding what constitutes "Unicode support"?
If setting "Unicode" for, well, everything in T-bird is not the solution, where is that supposed to be defined? Via a command line locale setting maybe?
How do I map "Message 152" to what's in my Inbox? (I haven't found a column that I can enable that would display the "Message Number"... whatever they are.)

I thought that perhaps I hadn't been seeing problems with any of these Unicode-laden emails because they were spam and I'd recognized that from its "Subject" line as spam and immediately dragged to the Junk folder along with other spam/junk selected using Ctrl-MB1. But the results of running "file" against my Inbox contents makes me wonder now.

TIA...

[1] -- That email has been in my Inbox for a while as it looked suspiciously like it could be a phishing attempt while claiming to be a notice about a new credit card I should be expecting in the mail. (The card did arrive so it's probably legit.)

RandomTroll · 02-29-2020, 09:43 PM

I've gotten better support for Mozilla products on their website. Have you tried looking at /var/spool/mail/rnturn ? Have you tried s-nail? It'll number your messages.

rnturn · 03-01-2020, 10:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RandomTroll

I've gotten better support for Mozilla products on their website.

Yes. And it mentions nothing regarding the Unicode messages.

Quote:

Have you tried looking at /var/spool/mail/rnturn ?

Nothing there.

Quote:

Have you tried s-nail? It'll number your messages.

So does mailx. Not a solution.

scasey · 03-01-2020, 11:38 AM

A brief web search suggests this might a Courier issue, not Firefox.

RandomTroll · 03-01-2020, 08:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rnturn

Yes. And it mentions nothing regarding the Unicode messages.

You can ask in the forum.

rnturn · 03-02-2020, 09:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by scasey

A brief web search suggests this might a Courier issue, not Firefox.

I assume you meant Thunderbird. :^)

It started after a Courier upgrade but the notification seems to indicate that it's a T-bird problem and not Courier. I'll try a screendump next time I see on those notices pop up. I've enabled all the Unicode settings I can find in T-bird to no avail (except whatever might be under about:config if there is such a avenue for config changes in T-bird).