Special characters in email subjects

[SteveTheTechie]

I am seeing some issues with special characters in email subjects. I am the maintenance developer for an email list server/CMS used by many Toastmasters Public Speaking clubs (FreeToastHost)... we use a lot of your email modules. (We probably owe you several lunches... lol)

I recently had a user determine that removing an "en dash" "–" character, ALT 0150, from his email subject text was the difference between it actually sending the email and not sending it.

I have seen some similar issues with special characters in subjects...

Any insights on this?

[rjbs]

This will depend on how the email is being created. Almost certainly the issue is one of encoding. As I recall, you're using Email::MIME, so the correct way to use it something like this:

my $subject = get_decoded_subject_from_user;
my $email = Email::MIME->create(
    header_str => [ Subject => $subject, ... ],
    ...
);

or

my $subj = get_utf8_encoded_subject_from_user;
my $decoded = Encode::decode('utf-8', $subj);
# ...and then as above...

If you use header and not header_str, you'll end up with wide characters in your message header, which is no good. They must be 7-bit, which you get by encoding with MIME encoded-words, which you'll get for free if you use header_str and pass in decoded (not UTF-8, etc. , encoded) strings.

Does that help?

[SteveTheTechie]

Using Email::MIME as follows.... Headers are set via parsing, not direct assignment:

my $message_received = my $message_in = '';  
while(<>) {
    $message_received .= $_;  # The incoming message as received (vs what was parsed)  
    if ( /^From / && $message_in eq '' ) { next; }  # The non-standard lines w/ "From" followed by space (no colon) must be omitted since Email::MIME cannot parse them and mangles the email if line not omitted.  
    $message_in .= $_;       # The incoming message that was parsed, with "From " lines omitted.  
}
## Initialize Objects
my $memail =  Email::MIME->new($message_in);  # Parse the headers.
my @orig_parts = clone($memail)->parts;    # Save the parts array from a clone of the original email object so they can be restored on each pass.  *Must* clone so that array is independent.

# Other stuff ...