Hebrew characters and squirrelmail and full enablement of hebrew in rhel 5.3

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom all,

I have a web server running Centos 5.2, will upgrade today to 5.3

Issues:
Installed Hebrew character sets and fonts.

System appears to do Hebrew.

Squirrelmail will receive mail in Hebrew but can not send. It turns the characters into gibberish.

Objectives:
Provide full system functionality in Hebrew on the system RHEL/Centos

Not change squirrelmail interface to Hebrew because I need English to work. I may try that to see if it helps.

Point criteria:
post splitting for points. Will not help.
10 points when I can send myself an email in Hebrew and not see gibberish.

Reasonable try 3-5 points.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

This is interesting.

I ran a test after installing hebrew fonts and character sets.

I sent an email with the word shalom (In Hebrew) in it with squirrelmail to myself in squirrelmail and to my yahoo account.

When I received the email in squirrelmail, it was garbage.

In yahoo, the hebrew shalom was received correctly.

SEP

[Ivan Ferreira]

Maybe, is the apache web server not able to understand the character set.

Try changing the following line in httpd.conf:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

To the correct charset.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Really great response.

The fact I can get a hebrew encoded message through the web server and squirrelmail to yahoo mail tells me its not a squirrelmail problem at all.

The solution of httpd.conf change was not enough. Something else needs to be done.

What at this point eludes me.

[Ivan Ferreira]

Maybe then the default_charset configuration in php.ini?

[Matti_Kurkela]

Check the mail headers, in particular the charset attribute of the Content-Type header.

If Squirrelmail created correct charset identifiers, the problem is with Squirrelmail's display of incoming mail.

If Squirrelmail did not set the charset identifier at all, or did set it wrong, Yahoo may still have identified the mail as valid Hebrew by using some heuristic. If Squirrelmail does not have such a heuristic, the lack of a correct charset identifier might be the reason it displays garbage.

MK

[Steven E. Protter]

The AddDefaultCharSet changes triggered problems with some clients. On English language websites, users were prompted to install a Hebrew character set by Windows.

This change had to be backed out today.

Does anyone know what changes are needed to php.ini to support Hebrew or other non english character sets.

This could be a squirrelmail issue. The language of squirrelmail can be switched to Hebrew and will probably work, but thats not what we want. We want support for limited Hebrew characters within the English language display.

SEP

[exitance · Accepted solution]

hi all,
I had the same issue - i needed the user interface to be in English and still be able to send emails in both hebrew and English.

the fix :

in the 'SquirrelmailDIR'/config/config.php file, change the $default_charset variable from ISO-8859-1 to utf-8 (after backup..)
it seems to work fine, but i didn't have time for proper testing.

[Steven E. Protter]

Well,

I will give it a go. I will test it as well.

Stand by for results. This idea makes sense since the problem has always seemed localized to squirrelmail.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

BINGO!

We have a solution.

Nice one.