Evolution, Outlook, and mail attachments2 min read

There’s an ugly bug in Outlook (a bug in Outlook?! ya don’t say…). If you use Evolution, and send out a nice mail with accents or special characters in the attachments’ filenames, like this:

Then Outlook will parse it like this:

If you have multiple files with the same extension, it will just name them “ATT*.dat” (where * is random gibberish) to differentiate them.
I discovered this “the hard way” when I was sending some serious business mail for school work/research and someone came up and asked “what are those .dat files for?”
Turns out there’s an option for this. In the preferences: Composer Preferences > General > Encode file names in an Outlook/GMail way. The gconf key that it controls (/apps/evolution/mail/composer/outlook_filenames), has the following description:

Encode file names in the mail headers same as Outlook or GMail do, to let them display correctly file names with UTF-8 letters sent by Evolution, because they do not follow the RFC 2231, but use the incorrect RFC 2047 standard.

So if you set that key to True, your mail shows up like this in Outlook:

My first reaction was, of course, FFFFUUUUUU- , followed by “argh, Outlook certainly has no bug tracker I could report this to“. I guess I’m too used to open source software.
And so we have to conform to crap like this to interoperate, or manually strip out accents from the mails we send to known Outlook users (I haven’t seen this problem in GMail). I wish I could just make Outlook vanish from existence, but, from my experience, few MS Outlook users are MS Outlook users by choice. Instead the software has been dictated by the work environment (in healthcare, the government, etc.).
Please tell me that MS got their act together and changed this in later versions (>XP)…