From: Justin J ...@dadamailproject.com>
Subject: [dadadev] Experimental Dada Mail w/unicode ¡Support! Released
Date: February 24th 2010

Hello everyone,

I've finally completely my first try at getting Dada Mail to walk, talk and eat Unicode.

This is the first step in the localization project, since we can't very well translate Dada Mail if Dada Mail can't use the translations available.

I have to let this project rest for a little bit (and collect my wits - it was a very difficult step!) but any and all feedback is welcome, if you'd like to give this a spin - bug reports/problems of any kind are very much appreciated.

This version of Dada Mail should basically be able to support any language that can in the unicode characters set and UTF-8 encoding. Which, should be, well, a lot of them. It doesn't (Dada Mail), but where it fails? I don't know - but it's a good time to test and see where it's wrong.

For simple Euro-centric stuff, like this:

Je peux manger du verre, ça ne me fait pas mal.

It should be fine. For something a little more wild:

أنا قادر على أكل الزجاج و هذا لا يؤلمني.

(which should be Arabic)

Well, I can only go on if something visually looks correct :) Even this email is sort of a test - I don't know if it's going to work, or not - so, fingers crossed! If it does - we're on a good track, since Dada Bridge taking a random email, having it go through the system that's mostly tested using a very specific way of creating emails and coming out readable on the other side is a great big step - not even talking about the online archive, rss/atom feeds, twitter thingie, etc, etc, etc.

Here's the download to the version I'm now running at the Dada Mail support site:

http://github.com/downloads/justingit/dada-mail/dada-4_0_2-unicode.zip

http://github.com/downloads/justingit/dada-mail/dada-4_0_2-unicode.tar.gz

If you want to check it out via github, the branch is at:

http://github.com/justingit/dada-mail/tree/charset_work

To grab it with git, you have to do this:

git clone git://github.com/justingit/dada-mail.git cd dada-mail
git fetch
git checkout --track -b your_local_branch_name origin/charset_work

Here's the explanation of all that:

http://groups.google.com/group/github/browse_thread/thread/71f944b925467ab6

There's a guide of what to expect with Dada Mail and unicode/UTF-8 you can read here:

http://dadamailproject.com/support/documentation-4_0_2-unicode/features-UTF-8.pod.html

Which I'll paste the contents of at the end of this message - but you may also want to compare it to the version of this doc for 4.0.2 STABLE:

http://dadamailproject.com/support/documentation-4_0_2/features-UTF-8.pod.html

(Long story short: 4.0.2 UTF-8/Unicode Support: "uhh...")

And, that's about it. This was a hard part of the project, since this is a 10+ y/o codebase - it very much pre-dates even unicode/UTF-8 support in Perl itself, so there's a reason, I guess, why the program was in such bad shape when it came to support it. Many,

many many bugs showed themselves, once this feature was asked for. I think a great majority of them have been solved.

Give it a spin if this interests you and if I can help out with anything, let me know,