How to disable header show "content-transfer-encoding 7bit"?

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thoste
Posts: 317
Joined: June 7th, 2003, 12:45 am

How to disable header show "content-transfer-encoding 7bit"?

Post by thoste »

When I click on one of the messages on my message list to show it in the preview pane below some headers are shown as well.

Occasionally another (beside From: Subject: To:) header appears:

content-transfer-conding: 7bit

sometimes

content-transfer-conding: 8bit

as well.

I guess this is an exception. But what is the default then?

How can I permanently hide this header line even if it is an exceptional encoding?

Is there a way to AUTOMATICALLY convert the content to another (e.g. default) encoding (e.g. by Addon) when I receive such a message (or later)?

Thomas
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tanstaafl
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Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: How to disable header show "content-transfer-encoding 7b

Post by tanstaafl »

You can't convert the encoding when you receive a message. The problem is not the encoding being used. Content-Transfer-Encoding is usually set to either 7bit or 8bit. Occasionally it will be set to Quoted-Printable (mainly if somebody used a Microsoft email client), Base64 or Binary (if its headers for an attachment). Its legal for it to be set to x-token but I've never run into that.

Normally if you see additional headers beyond to/cc/bcc/subject its because you didn't select view -> headers -> normal . However, view -> headers -> all would add a lot more headers than Content-Transfer-Encoding. The only other ways I know of to display more headers is via redefining whats "normal" using either mailnews.headers.showOrganization , mailnews.headers.showUserAgent or mailnews.headers.extraExpandedHeaders or by installing a add-on such as Mnenhy and using it to add more headers. However, I'd expect it to be consistent in what it shows, you normally have a Content-Transfer-Encoding: header in every message . If I understand you correctly, this problem only occurs occasionally.

Is it consistent? i.e. if you see this problem with a specific message, do you always see that problem with that message, even if you read some other messages in the interim or restarted Thunderbird?

Displaying two copies of Content-Transfer-Encoding, with different values, is puzzling because the second Content-Transfer-Encoding header would be part of another MIME part such as a attachment. If a second Content-Transfer-Encoding header is shown I'd have expected additional headers such as Content-Type: to also be shown.

See if this is a side effect of an add-on that doesn't work well anymore with the current version of Thunderbird by using help -> restart with add-ons disabled.

Any idea what changed that may have triggered this? Did it only occur after the last upgrade, you added some more add-ons, recovered from a bad crash ....
thoste
Posts: 317
Joined: June 7th, 2003, 12:45 am

Re: How to disable header show "content-transfer-encoding 7b

Post by thoste »

@tanstaafl:

Thank you for your comment.

According to your suggestion I investigated the mailnews.headers.* and found out that mailnews.headers.extraExpandedHeaders was changed to

x-enigmail-version content-transfer-encoding openpgp x-mimeole x-bugzilla-reason x-php-bug

Hmm, this must be changed somehow in the past by an Addon or I must have done it accidentially myself.

As AddOn I suspect Enigmal since it appears in the list of headers of the mentioned preferences.

Whats the "normal" value of mailnews.headers.extraExpandedHeaders?

Will EnigMail be confused if I revert back to default?
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tanstaafl
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Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Re: How to disable header show "content-transfer-encoding 7b

Post by tanstaafl »

The list of expanded headers includes stuff like x-bugzilla-reason so I suspect you added them.

The normal value of mailnews.headers.extraExpandedHeaders is a empty string (no entry in the Value column). I wouldn't expect that reverting to the default value would effect Enigmail.
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