Decoding 7Bit content-transfer-encoding messages with special characters

Question

I have a case where my code is receiving e-mail messages (pop3, multipart) that has its content-transfer-encoding set to 7Bit. The problem is that the language (from an automatic system) is norwegian. The norwegian language has three special characters (ÆØÅ/æøå). So when I receive the messages, I can get words like this: &N?D?PNER ALARM (ÅPNER ALARM), and kj?kkenomr?de (kjøkkenområde). Is the information about the characters lost, or can they be decoded somehow?

Answer 1

Where are those words appearing? In the headers or the message body?

If you use a library like MailKit , this will automatically be handled properly for you in message bodies and can easily be tuned to handle it even if it is in the headers by specifying a fallback charset to the parser.

If you are using another library, you are probably out of luck (most I've looked at are horrendously bad at this).