Email headers and non-ASCII characters

[Christoph Haas]

On Thursday 23 November 2006 16:31, Max M wrote:
> Christoph Haas skrev:
> > Hello, everyone...
> >
> > I'm trying to send an email to people with non-ASCII characters in
> > their names. A recpient's address may look like:
> >
> > "Jörg Nørgens" <joerg at nowhere>
> >
> > My example code:
> >
> > =================================
> > def sendmail(sender, recipient, body, subject):
> >    message = MIMEText(body)
> >    message['Subject'] = Header(subject, 'iso-8859-1')
> >    message['From'] = Header(sender, 'iso-8859-1')
> >    message['To'] = Header(recipient, 'iso-8859-1')
> >
> >    s = smtplib.SMTP()
> >    s.connect()
> >    s.sendmail(sender, recipient, message.as_string())
> >    s.close()
> > =================================
> >
> > However the Header() method encodes the whole expression in
> > ISO-8859-1:
> >
> > =?iso-8859-1?q?=22J=C3=B6rg_N=C3=B8rgens=22_=3Cjoerg=40nowhere=3E?=
> >
> > However I had expected something like:
> >
> > "=?utf-8?q?J=C3=B6rg?= =?utf-8?q?_N=C3=B8rgens?=" <joerg at nowhere>
> >
> > Of course my mail transfer agent is not happy with the first string
>
> Why offcourse?

Because my MTA doesn't care about MIME. It just transports the email. And 
it expects an email address in <...> but doesn't decode =?iso...? strings.

> But it seems that you are passing the Header object a 
> utf-8 encoded string, not a latin-1 encoded.
> You are telling the header the encoding. Not asking it to encode.

Uhm, okay. Let's see:

u'"Jörg Nørgens" <joerg at nowhere>'.encode('latin-1')

=> '"J\xc3\xb6rg N\xc3\xb8rgens" <joerg at nowhere>'

So far so good. Now run Header() on it:

=> '=?utf-8?b?IkrDtnJnIE7DuHJnZW5zIiA8am9lcmdAbm93aGVyZT4=?='

Still nothing like <...> in it and my MTA is unhappy again. What am I 
missing? Doesn't anyone know how mail clients handle that encoding?

Desperately,
 Christoph