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I started treating what Joel says much less seriously after discovering that FogBugz sends E-mail using "windows-1252" or "windows-1250" character sets instead
by jwr 13y ago
I started treating what Joel says much less seriously after discovering that FogBugz sends E-mail using "windows-1252" or "windows-1250" character sets instead of UTF-8. I reported this as a problem to customer service, but was told that it will not be changed. Quoting from the reply I got "joelonsoftware.com is a blog. Fog Creek Software is a business."
Some people might give Joel additional credibility because of his successful business — but there seems to be a gap between theory and practice, which undermines that credibility, at least for me.
- mhp 13y agoI'm sorry you got that reply. I don't doubt you received it, but it doesn't reflect how I believe my company should have responded to you. This is actually a feature. FogBugz DOES send email in UTF-8 (just copy some hebrew text and send an email to yourself) if it has to. If it doesn't have to, it will not do so simply because it's working around old email clients that don't support UTF-8. FogBugz has supported all kinds of languages for many, many years, so there's some possibility you are talking about a reply you received before that even happened, but I think you just observed a normal English only email from FogBugz has the content-type set to windows-1252. You could argue at this point that we probably don't need that workaround anymore I guess. I just have to weigh that against whether it's broken now (it's not) vs. the new support emails we would get from people who were having problems with email because they were still using Eudora 3.0. It turns out that it's actually BECAUSE of the whole reason Joel wrote that article that FogBugz sends English email in windows-1252.