Re: [exim] Iconv

On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Ron McKeating wrote:

> OK have done a little more investigation.
>
> An email came in for a user with the following headers
>
> From: =?GB2312?B?0e7PyMn6?= <szyang8@???>

So it's base64-encoded, and the character encoding ("charset" in MIME
terminology, sorry to be pedantic) was GB2312, (which I understand to
be mainland simplified Chinese - not that this affects the issue
much).

Decoding the base64 encoding indeed produces the byte-sequence which
you reported. And the incoming header, as far as I can tell, was
protocol-correct.

> The vacation script automatically replies to say this bod is on hols.
> The log entry is
>
> 2005-09-30 00:29:23 1EL7q6-0000sg-Sw => >ÑîÏÈÉú <szyang8@???>
> <adpgt@???> R=vacation T=address_reply

As you see, those raw bytes have been written to the log. You're then
pasting them into your mail to this list, that's advertised as
iso-8859-1, resulting in the unreadable sequence of accented Latin-1
characters that I (and presumably most of the rest of us) are seeing.

(We don't get to see what was actually included in the header of the
vacation reply, so I'm keeping an open mind on that. If it's
protocol correct, it'll also be base-64-encoded like the incoming
header.)

> So, is this what exim is supposed to do,

I'm afraid that's where my contribution ends, right at this minute.
The key seems to be T=address_reply in one's configuration. Ours
calls driver = autoreply - I presume yours does so too.

> This latter entry breaks exilog, which is why we discovered it.

Oh.

I'm personally interested in character code issues (as my web pages
doubtless reveal), so if no-one comes up with an answer I'll try to
find a moment myself to look at this.