#5 Bad display of nonascii charsets in subj

[Antonis Christofides]

I don't know the RFC numbers at this time, but the
message headers should be in 7-bit ASCII. Some
newsreaders, however, post 8-bit ASCII (with which
Moabdar has no problem). Other newsreaders, more
correctly, use an extension that specifies some kind of
MIME encoding. Moabdar always assumes the header is in
plain text, thus displaying the mime code rather than
the result. For example, see the message

http://www.itia.ntua.gr/ntuastar/?state=show_article&newsgroup=ntua.discuss&article=0005062

which has a subject in Greek.

[Antonis Christofides]

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The whole story is as follows: Email is described by RFC
822, which says it should all be in 7-bit ASCII. RFC 1521 is
an extension that allows the message body to be in another
character set and/or contain attachments. RFC 1522 is an
extension that allows the message headers to contain
characters from other character sets.

Newsgroup messages are described by RFC 1036. I don't know
if there are any extensions, but I've heard that, strictly
speaking, RFC 1522 does not apply to newsgroups. However,
many newsgroup readers support it.

Moabdar's problem can be solved by using the MIME::Tools
Perl modules. MIME::Tools is a collection of related
modules, the most interesting of which is, for our purposes,
MIME::Words.