reading iso-8859-15 mail messages

[Adrian Lanz]

I have sometimes problems to read incoming mail messages with
international characters like german umlauts (two dots on a "a", for
instance). The symptom is that umlauts in the message body are shown
as blanks. It seems that the problem is related to iso-8859-15 encoded
mail messages (erroneously?) autoconverted to quoted-printable by a
MTA? Two examples are added below.

Deeper explanation of the problem and help on how to make in these
cases not displayed characters (shown as blanks) visible is very
welcome!

Thanks, Adrian.



My .emacs language settings are:

(setq default-enable-multibyte-characters t)
(set-language-environment "Latin-1")


Mail header example 1:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by <omitted>


Mail header example 2: This is somehow fancier, iso-8859-1 in the
subject field and iso-8859-15 in the mail body. The subject displays
correctly in Gnus, however umlauts in the message body are not
displayed (shown as blanks).

Subject: diverse =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6glichkeiten_uns?=
Content-Type: text/plain; Format=Flowed; DelSp=Yes; charset=ISO-8859-15
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by <omitted>


C-u C-x = on a not displayed character (supposed to be an
umlaut a) gives in both cases:

  character: ä (07544, 3940, 0xf64, U+00E4)
    charset: latin-iso8859-15 <originally no line break>
    (Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet 9 (ISO/IEC 8859-15): ISO-IR-203.)
 code point: 100
     syntax: w  which means: word
   category: l:Latin  
buffer code: 0x8E 0xE4
  file code: 0xE4 (encoded by coding system iso-8859-1-unix)
    display: by this font (glyph code)
     -urw-bookman <ommited>-iso8859-15 (0xE4)