weird subject in email notifications

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weird subject in email notifications

Postby pricerc » Mon May 18, 2020 11:01 am

any idea why most of my forum notifications now have a subject line something like this:

=?UTF-8?B?VG9waWMgcmVwbHkgbm90aWZpY2F0aW9uIC0gIkFsdGVybmF0aXZlIGxvZ2lu?= =?UTF-8?B?IGNyZWRlbnRpYWxzIGZvciBDb25uZWN0aW9uIFdpemFyZCI=?=

?
/Ryan

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Re: weird subject in email notifications

Postby Mike.Sheen » Mon Jun 15, 2020 6:23 pm

pricerc wrote:any idea why most of my forum notifications now have a subject line something like this:

=?UTF-8?B?VG9waWMgcmVwbHkgbm90aWZpY2F0aW9uIC0gIkFsdGVybmF0aXZlIGxvZ2lu?= =?UTF-8?B?IGNyZWRlbnRpYWxzIGZvciBDb25uZWN0aW9uIFdpemFyZCI=?=

?


I've noticed this as well - started happening a few months ago. We've not changed anything that I'm aware of, so I suspect it's something in Office 365 (which is what we use to email out from the forums software) which changed recently.

A subject of =?UTF-8?B?VG9waWMgcmVwbHkgbm90aWZpY2F0aW9uIC0gIkFsdGVybmF0aXZlIGxvZ2lu?= is a perfectly acceptable way for email subjects to contain non-ASCII characters and is compliant with RFC 1342.

The format is: =?charset?encoding?encoded-text?=

In our case we're sending the charset as UTF-8 and the encoding as B which represents Base 64 - so that means the encoded-text (VG9waWMgcmVwbHkgbm90aWZpY2F0aW9uIC0gIkFsdGVybmF0aXZlIGxvZ2lu) is the base 64 encoded subject - which decodes to:
Topic reply notification - "Alternative login


Maybe in a few months Office 365 will revert their change and things will go back to how they were.
Mike Sheen
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Jiwa Financials

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Re: weird subject in email notifications

Postby pricerc » Tue Jun 30, 2020 4:10 pm

my forums mail goes to my GMail account, which is where I noticed this.

I decided to test forward one to my live.com account, and it gets the expected subject, even though the encoded subject is prepended with a 'FWD'.

To further add to the curiosity - my GMail 'sent' items has the subject displaying in English instead of Base64.

So I'd say it's just GMail not decoding correctly in my 'Forums' inbox...
/Ryan

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