Zend_Mail constructor sets charset value from passed argument. This is not a problem, but there is no way to set it after you have an object of this class, there is no a setCharset(), but it still is not a problem.

The constructor has one argument, this one has as default value "iso-8859-1", it does not look good. The construct method also makes hard to extends the class and to overwrite it, once this not follow the code standard, users must send default charset encoding to parent constructor.

http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/…

Sample

class My_Mail extends Zend_Mail
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        // do something...
    }
}

$mail = new My_Mail();

or

class My_Mail extends Zend_Mail
{
    public function __construct($charset = null)
    {
        // do something...
        parent::__construct($charset);
    }
}

$mail = new My_Mail();

Expected result

$mail->_charset; // "iso-8859-1"

Actual result

$mail->_charset; // null