Typically I will not discuss work on this site, but this is going to be an exception.

For the last few days I’ve been working on a problem that one person has faced when sending email through a powerful software package called SugarCRM.  This is a great application and I would recommend it for anyone that’s looking for a slick web-based CRM suite.  That said, there are occasionally some pains from time to time when users uncover specific areas that have not been fully tackled by the programmers.

Last week, one of those issues was passed to me.  A user who had a special accent in their name was reporting their displayed name would show up very weird whenever an email was sent.  This looked to be a character set issue, but after several hours, this proved to not be the case.  Over the course of the next 60 hours I learned how emails worked, their history, their requirements and read seemingly all the RFC’s that have been published on the subject in the last 20 years (including the 1993 RFC on the Japanese Japanese Character Encoding for Internet Messages).  After all this time, I had determined where the problem originated and resolved the matter for the user.

Yay!

I had never thought I would need to learn so much about email.  Now that I have, though, I can see why certain decisions have been made over the years regarding the many different standards that are out.  I’m also confident enough in what I’ve learned to actually build an alternate version of PHP’s sendmail() function should it become necessary.

Now the hard part will be billing the appropriate customer for the right amount of time … for the sake of a single user’s display name, we will be billing them 60 hours of work.  Somehow I doubt that it will fly.