Chinese characters in mails get messed-up

[wangym]

Hi,

I just got my Lumia 800, and is generally happy with my decision.

However, there's one thing keeps bugging me all the time: Chinese characters tends to get messed-up (and displayed as raw utf-8 code) after several rounds replies (usually 7 or 8, but i didn't keep the count).

In fact, the entire mail (body and header) get rendered into something like the following;:

=?utf-8?B?YXJhenl=?=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=f46d04088ef55c762f04c2011ef3

--f46d04088ef55c762f04c2011ef3
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Today's lunch is not bad, green chilly plus beef
=E5=8F=91=E4=BB=B6=E4=BA=BA: Yingqian Zhao
=E5=8F=91=E9=80=81=E6=97=B6=E9=97=B4: 2012/6/9 10:46
=E6=94=B6=E4=BB=B6=E4=BA=BA: Yuan Min Wang



Actually this issue happened on my Andriol before, then I returned the Andriol phone thought it was a defect, but right now it is occuring on Lumia 800 as well.

I tried to enforce in the GMAIL setting that "all out-going mails using UTF-8 encoding", and the problem persists.

'm really confused, I understand that most of you people will never experience this probably because you won't likely to be using chinese (or other eastern-characters sets), so i'm just trying out my luck to see if anyone can provide some insight / hint from the technological perspectives.

Apologize for my non-native English, let me know if there's more info you'll need.

Thanks and regards,
YM

 

[rbrunner]

Is it really your Lumia

How sure are you that it's really your own Lumia phone which does something wrong?

If you look at all the mail servers, mail apps, webmail frontends, browsers using those webmail frontends, and so on, that are currently in use in the whole wide world, not yet all of them correctly handle mails in UTF-8, or they do try to handle them but contain some bugs and sometimes fail.

So, for example, if you send a mail from your Lumia to a friend, we have your Lumia, your provider's mail server, your friend's mail server, your friend's mail program or your friend's webmail website and your friend's browser that all can do something wrong until you receive the answer to your mail and it is not formatted correctly anymore.

I think it can be really difficult to find where exactly the problem lies.

 

[wangym]

How sure are you that it's really your own Lumia phone which does something wrong?

If you look at all the mail servers, mail apps, webmail frontends, browsers using those webmail frontends, and so on, that are currently in use in the whole wide world, not yet all of them correctly handle mails in UTF-8, or they do try to handle them but contain some bugs and sometimes fail.

So, for example, if you send a mail from your Lumia to a friend, we have your Lumia, your provider's mail server, your friend's mail server, your friend's mail program or your friend's webmail website and your friend's browser that all can do something wrong until you receive the answer to your mail and it is not formatted correctly anymore.

I think it can be really difficult to find where exactly the problem lies.

I'm posting this thread here primarily due to the fact that I'm using a Lumia 800, and I'm sorry if I forgot to mention that it seems to be a "universal" problem for any wp7.5

Agreed, it's difficult to rule out all the other possibilities.

However, such to inform that such thing never occurs when I'm replying/writing mails with iPad, between myself and the same recipient.

Thanks.

 

[rbrunner]

Mail length problem

Is my understanding correct that after so many rounds of sending mails back and forth the resulting mail becomes rather long?

If yes, the problem could simply be some length limit within the WP7 mail program: The program looses some part of the mail that contains the information how it is encoded (or cannot process it any longer) , and it starts to show the raw, undecoded mail text - that's what your post shows, in any way, the mail's ASCII-only representation.

Or maybe there is a limit for the number of MIME parts, and all MIME parts above the limit are displayed as plain text.

The iPad might then have no such limits or at least higher limits.

What do you think? Are these theories consistent with what you see?

 

[wangym]

Is my understanding correct that after so many rounds of sending mails back and forth the resulting mail becomes rather long?

If yes, the problem could simply be some length limit within the WP7 mail program: The program looses some part of the mail that contains the information how it is encoded (or cannot process it any longer) , and it starts to show the raw, undecoded mail text - that's what your post shows, in any way, the mail's ASCII-only representation.

Or maybe there is a limit for the number of MIME parts, and all MIME parts above the limit are displayed as plain text.

The iPad might then have no such limits or at least higher limits.

What do you think? Are these theories consistent with what you see?

Yes, the mail threads went corrupted are usually been back-and-forth for quite a few rounds.

However, i'm not quite sure they can be called "long", because most of the messages are composed of only one or two sentences.

But that's a very good point, let me take a note and keep an eye on it.

Thanks rbrunner.

Regards,
YM