Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:32:43 +0000

getting simple stuff wrong

I doubt I am the first one to wonder how a huge internet based company like amazon.(de|at) can manage to be unable to send un-broken e-mails, however I just cannot resist.

The regular plain text e-mails about orders (Bestellung erhalten/Bestellung versandt) are broken in a simple way, they are declared as Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ascii while actually containing Windows-1252 characters (Umlauts, Euro-character). I usually fix these in mutt with <Ctrl>-e.

This week I returned an incorrectly labeled product back to Amazon and in return received a surprisingly broken mail, header and footer as UTF-8 while the core of the mail is Windows-1252 again.

Looks like this in mutt

Guten Tag!

Wir grüßen Sie ganz herzlich und informieren  ine Erstattung zu der
Betreff genannten Bestellung.

Unsere Zahlungsabteilung hat Ihnen EUR 12,29 \374berwiesen.

etc...


Posted by Andreas Metzler | Permanent link | File under: rant