Arabic encoding problems in Mail

[ormskirk]

Mail doesn't seem able to retain the encoding of Arabic messages when you use the 'reply' or 'forward' function. When I hit 'reply' or 'forward' on an Arabic message, Mail creates a message using the default encoding and the quoted Arabic text appears as garble. Changing the encoding at that point enables me to write Arabic in the message, but the quoted text remains garbled.

Has anyone solved this one? Or has anyone found a truly Arabic-capable email client for OSX?

[bedouin]

Do you have Arabic installed as in the attached screenshot, or just the Arabic keyboard installed? To have access to all possible encodings available you need to install it under the languages tab in preferences as well.

When I reply to Arabic E-Mails they do not garble in Mail.app, however for the sake of the person receiving it, I usually select all text in the mail (including the quoted text) and change the writing direction to right-to-left, and also make the encoding Arabic (Windows).

[ormskirk]

Thanks, bedouin. Yes, I do have Arabic in the language control panel as well as the keyboard list. My Mail client simply doesn't retain the Arabic encoding when I hit 'reply'. It turns the text to gibberish and changing the encoding of the message back to Arabic-Windows doesn't make any difference.

[ormskirk]

Is there a known issue with the way Yahoo mail encodes Arabic?

All the messages that are causing problems are generated by Yahoo mail. I can view them by selecting the Arabic-Windows encoding, but when I look at the raw header the actual encoding used appears to be different:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

This might also explain why people receiving my messages in Arabic created in Mail complain that they are garbled.

[bedouin]

I'm going to briefly outline some issues here, not necessarily for you (because you're probably aware of many) but for future reference.

First thing to address: web-based mail clients. This includes Yahoo, Hotmail, and GMail. Yahoo and Hotmail, and really most web-based mail services, are not very sensitive to non-Latin character sets. GMail seems to be very-much Unicode aware, so it makes a sensible choice if you're absolutely set on using a web-based E-Mail service.

Yahoo, Hotmail, and its ilk completely trash Unicode text. OS X's Arabic support is completely Unicode based; this is also the case with Linux's implementations of Arabic. When it comes to reaching the largest possible audience of people, in any non-Latin character set, Unicode is where it's at.

Now, for some reason Yahoo and Hotmail have absolutely no problem accepting CP1256 (Windows Arabic) text, and it doesn't mangle it. This is why you can read Windows encoded E-Mail messages in Mail.app. However, if you would load Yahoo or Hotmail in Safari, Yahoo would mangle your Unicode Arabic into a series of question marks after composition.

The program UnicodeChecker can convert Unicode into HTML entities. This will let other users of Yahoo or Hotmail read your text, but unfortunately users or Outlook Express and Mail App will not be able to.

When Yahoo and Hotmail get into the mix of a message thread on say, an E-Mail list, it throws things off, probably because of its use of plain-text. My only suggestion is that before sending your message, you select all text in the message, and then change the encoding to either Unicode, Arabic Windows, or ISO-8859-6. I'm assuming that should force Mail App to change the encoding in the message's headers. If not, maybe your only option is to compose a message from scratch anytime a Yahoo or Hotmail person is involved.

I left you a private message with a document attached. I'm trying to put together a guide on using Arabic E-Mail between different services, clients, and platforms. Maybe you have suggestions and could add, or test out more clients.

[ormskirk]

This is really helpful. I can stop cursing the Mail.app. The best course seems to be always to create a new message when emailing someone on Yahoo. The 'reply' or 'forward' functions are never going to work.

[zillah]

Is there any advice how can I fix this issue ?



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