Outbound character sets

Question

Hi
Our outbound external messages go out via a GW704 GWIA. The GWIA thenpasses them onto our email security gateway.
The issue that I'm having is that I've enabled a 'disclaimer' on our email security gateway that is stamped on all outbound messages. The HTML version of the disclaimer that works perfectly but the Plain Text version is causing me grief.
When I include French characters such as and in the disclaimer it doesn't get appended to the outbound messages.
I spoke to the security gateway support team and they tell me that it won't work if our outbound character set is set to US-ASCII. It needs to be UTF8 (or similar) for these characters to work properly.
I checked the character set that the GWIA is sending out with and it is indeed US-ASCII.
Is there a way I can set the GWIA to use the UTF8 (or similar) character set so that I can include these dodgy foreign characters in our disclaimer? I've looked through the config file and settings and
nothing is jumping out at me.
If there is a way and I set it am I likely to run into any other issues with messages that were previously going out ok?
Thanks

Answer 1

On 6/17/2011 10:06 AM, MPlumb wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> Our outbound external messages go out via a GW704 GWIA. The GWIA
> thenpasses them onto our email security gateway.
>
> The issue that I'm having is that I've enabled a 'disclaimer' on our
> email security gateway that is stamped on all outbound messages. The
> HTML version of the disclaimer that works perfectly but the Plain Text
> version is causing me grief.
>
> When I include French characters such as and in the disclaimer it
> doesn't get appended to the outbound messages.
>
> I spoke to the security gateway support team and they tell me that it
> won't work if our outbound character set is set to US-ASCII. It needs to
> be UTF8 (or similar) for these characters to work properly.
>
> I checked the character set that the GWIA is sending out with and it is
> indeed US-ASCII.
>
> Is there a way I can set the GWIA to use the UTF8 (or similar)
> character set so that I can include these dodgy foreign characters in
> our disclaimer? I've looked through the config file and settings and
> nothing is jumping out at me.
>
> If there is a way and I set it am I likely to run into any other issues
> with messages that were previously going out ok?
>
> Thanks
>
>
Outgoing mail encoding is controlled at the Client. The gwia setting is
just a fallback
However they are IMO
a) lying - US-ASCII is a 100% subset of UTF-8. Hence any US-ASCII only
encoder will ALWAYS be accepted as UTF-8 . The reverse is NOT true -
UTF-8 will get corrupted going through a US-ASCII gate. But that's not
what they said.
b) Pretty much NOT an excuse, because email security gateways (unless
they are ineffective), have to be able to parse MIME in character sets
of, oh at least 15 varieties. So they are making a tacit admission their
product is substandard, and unable to protect against malware. By
definition if you can parse text for malware and content (and to do so
you must be able to read/write that character set), you should not have
this problem.
So either your description is incomplete, or you need to seriously
consider leaving this provider ASAP.
Disclaimer : I work for and have written email security software for
GWAVA, which would be a competitor.