[tz] TZDB patches, UTF-8, and Microsoft Exchange

[Thomas M. Steenholdt]

Sorry about that. In my experience, Office 365 can be a pain in the neck 
for something like this. Getting a cli mailer set up for 'git 
send-email' is non-trivial with oauth2 requirements etc. It can be done 
for sure, but it used to be a whole lot simpler.

I tend to simply use the web client, which appears to then mess with the 
encoding, and with seemingly no way to change that. I should probably 
just have attached the patch, rather than in-lining it. I believe that 
would have prevented the problem.

(FWIW, this mail is sent with Thunderbird instead)


On 02/12/2022 19.09, Paul Eggert wrote:
> By the way, I had a little trouble applying your Greenland patch, 
> because it was encoded in ISO 8859-1, and even though its email header 
> line correctly said 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"', 
> Git understandably took alarm at the mixture of the patch's ISO 8859-1 
> and tzdata's UTF-8 and refused to apply the patch.
>
> As it turned out I needed to edit the patch anyway so this was only a 
> minor hiccup. Still, it looks like this could be a systematic problem 
> with Microsoft Outlook and/or Exchange, and I wonder whether we can 
> briefly advise Microsoft-using patch-senders to avoid future glitches. 
> Unfortunately I don't use Microsoft software for email and so don't 
> know what to suggest.
>
> Would it suffice to say "Please use 'git send-email'", or would that 
> not work because Microsoft Exchange transcodes email from UTF-8 into 
> ISO 8859-1?
>
> Does Microsoft Exchange transcode attachments, so even "Please send 
> the patch as an attachment" does not work?
>
> Or was the problem here that Microsoft Outlook transcodes outgoing 
> mail, and if so can this be fixed by asking users to specify UTF-8 
> encoding for outgoing messages at File > Options > Advanced > 
> International options[1]?
>
> Any suggestions would be welcome.
>
> [1]: 
> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mail-flow/content-conversion/message-encoding?view=exchserver-2019#outlook-settings