[Bug 140896] Re: Cron does send mails with wrong charset

[wdoekes]

@Josep: that bug report is unrelated. (Although it touches the same
cron_default_mail_charset code.)

This issue is that:

(A) The cron daemon starts with no LANG (LANG=C)
(B) The processes start with the lang environment from /etc/default/locale (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)

Now the processes will print stuff like:

    $ rm abc
    rm: cannot remove ‘abc’ <-- note the non-ascii characters, because it has LANG=...UTF-8

But the mail with that error, will use:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968

instead of:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

That causes mail clients to get UTF-8 while it is told that it gets
ASCII, resulting in a crappy reading experience.


A working fix for me is to add the LANG variable to /etc/init/cron.conf so the cron process gets 

    # echo 'env LANG=en_US.UTF-8' > /etc/init/cron.override
    # stop cron; start cron

(Or alternately, the CONTENT_TYPE= setting in crontab as suggested in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=410057 )

I believe this bug got introduced by using upstart instead of the init script:
- the processes get the environment from /etc/pam.d/cron (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)
- cron gets the environment from /etc/default/locale BUT ONLY if it was started from /etc/init.d/cron. the upstart script does not load /etc/environment nor /etc/default/locale.

.. so .. that should probably mean that this is a ubuntu/cron bug, not
an ubuntu/+source/cron bug.

And it first starts showing in Trusty because the tools use fancier
tokens when unicode is available:

    ubuntu precise:
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove `/tmp/abc': No such file or directory

    ubuntu trusty
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove ‘/tmp/abc’: No such file or directory <-- see the fancy quotes here

Cheers,
Walter Doekes
OSSO B.V.

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Release:	14.04
Codename:	trusty
# dpkg -l cron | grep ^ii
ii  cron 3.0pl1-124ubuntu2

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/140896

Title:
  Cron does send mails with wrong charset

Status in “cron” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “cron” package in Debian:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: cron

  Hello,

  cron does use the wrong charset when sending mails. With Feisty the
  default charset is UTF8 but cron uses charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968. There is
  already a debian bug report and a possible solution here:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=410057

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