[Catalyst] Catalyst::Plugin::Email and utf-8

[Bill Moseley]

I'm emailing content that's in utf-8, and when using the Email plugin
I would get "Wide character" errors when Net::Cmd was writing via
SMTP.


First question:

Should the Email plugin look for utf-8 in the "body" and change the
encoding?  Is that the realm of the plugin or should that be in client
code?

In my application base class I'm now doing:

    sub email {
        my $c = shift;
        my $email = ref $_[0] ? shift : {@_};

        if ( $email->{body} && utf8::is_utf8( $email->{body} )  ) {
            $email->{body} = encode( 'utf8', $email->{body} );
            $email->{attributes}{encoding} = 'base64';
            $email->{attributes}{charset}  = 'utf-8';
        }

        $c->SUPER::email( %$email );

    }

which adds these headers:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

and encodes the body as base64.

Would that be useful as a standard part of the Email plugin?


Second question:

What is the opinion on how to send the mail?  The default is to use SMTP
to localhost.

In general, I prefer to use sendmail (qmail-inject/exim/postfix)
to inject mail via a pipe.  But, using the sendmail interface has its
own problems, such as using -f to set the sender and configuring to be a
"trusted" user, and potentially forking multiple times when sending a
number of emails.  Also seem more likely with SMTP that sending email
might end up delayed.

Sending multiple emails with $c->email doesn't seem great, either, as
each is a separate smtp connection.  I'm not sending that many emails
at once (30 or 40), still it doesn't seem ideal to do that in the
middle of a http request.


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org