charset check blocks my messages

[crowolo]

when I paste lines from web to the irc client (irssi) which uses a bitlbee local server to connect to msn I often get the error "Error: Charset mismatch detected.", so my messages aren't received by msn users. I also tried to change charset from utf-8 to iso8859-1 and iso8859-15, my terminal emulator's charset, and nothing changed. It seems I even couldn't disable the charset check. everything worked in previous versions of bitlbee.

anyway, I think the charset check itself is a bug as it chooses what messages it likes to send. I see no reason why the bitlbee server should select messages, it should be only a proxy.

[toxik]

The problem

The IRC RFC defines no charset to use, but different IM protocols expect different charsets. (At least could.)

The solution

You tell BitlBee what charset your IRC client sends, it recodes from that to the destined charset for that IM protocol.

Conclusion

You misconfigured your IRC client, terminal or your BitlBee.

[wilmer]

anyway, I think the charset check itself is a bug as it chooses what messages it likes to send. I see no reason why the bitlbee server should select messages, it should be only a proxy.

It doesn't work that way. Not every IM network has the same expectations when it comes to character encoding of incoming/outgoing messages, so BitlBee needs to encode/decode everything.

Can you show a rawlog that shows this problem? Possibly your IRC client is also recoding stuff. Just type "set charset" and then some message with non-ASCII stuff to show the problem.