[rt-users] Remaining issues in RT 3.0.2's handling of international characters

[Dirk Pape]

Hello,

I start this thread to collect the observed issues still in RT 3.0.2 when 
handling international characters (like German Umlauts) in Emails or in the 
Web-Interface.

This is the only group of issues that make me hesitating in making RT 3 
productive on my site.

So I start with my config:

RT: Version 3.0.2
OS: Debian Linux Woody
Apache: 1.3.26 with SSL
Modperl: 1
DBS. mysql
Perl: 5.8.0
sbin/rt-testdepedencies happy with all installed perl-libs

my issues (please add your's and your comments):

1. wrong ISO-8859-1 encoding of outgoing From-headers with umlauts in it, 
eg. in '"RT/MI (Sebastian Lück)" <lueck at inf.fu-berlin.de>' the part '"RT/MI 
(Sebastian Lück)" <lueck' is in a whole bracketed with ISO-8859-1?... 
brackets, hence MUAs fail to sort by email adresses.

temp. WORKAROUND: do not use umlauts in Real Names stored in RT-User-Prefs

2. from time to time incoming (non-utf8) Email will not be converted any 
more to utf8. It will though be marked as being converted, but in real 
contain ISO-character-encodings. I have to be vague here, because I cannot 
reproduce any trigger of this behaviour. But if this happens, it seems to 
stick for one apache process.

To be more specific I add some observations:

A. If this behaviour is triggered, some (but not all) later incoming 
messages are not being converted correctly (as described before).

B. Because of the wrong encoding they display corrupt in the Web-view and 
in email notifications to customers or admin are corrupt, too.

C. If I restart apache the problem is cured for a while (one or some days) 
(This could be stated as a temp. WORKAROUND). The corrupt messages which 
are stored in the DBS remain corrupt.

Because Jesse asked me to do, I forwarded all email messages coming to RT 
in an external message box. The copies are never seen by RT. From this 
follow the following observations:

D. The incoming messages are correct. It is RT, which corrupts them in 
between accepting them and storing them into the DBS.

E. I tried to re-feed the messages (bounce them to the rt-address) into RT 
in the same order they arrived before after restarting apache. I could 
*not* trigger the problem reproducable with this, hence it should not spend 
on one specific mail.

Tell me anything I can do further to trap the problem's cause and I will 
try to do.

Dirk.