How to retrieve a IMAP body with the right charset?

Question

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to make an "IMAP fetch" command to retrieve the message body. I need to pass/use the correct charset, otherwise the response will come with special characters.

How can I make the IMAP request/command to consider the charset I received in the BODYSTRUCTURE result??

Answer 1

The IMAP server will send non-ASCII message body data as an 8-bit "literal", which is essentially an array of bytes. You can't make the FETCH command use a specific charset, as far as I know.

It's up to the IMAP library or your application to decode the byte array into a string representation using the appropriate charset you received in the BODYSTRUCTURE response.