Re: [smtpmail.el] Encoding problem in smtpmail-send-queued-mail

[Jesper Harder]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

> However, it's not clear to me that this is the right solution.  It
> could solve the problem in your specific case, due to the specific
> character set (Latin-1, as evidenced by the \201) you used in the
> messages which served as a test case for the change you propose, but
> it might not work correctly for other character sets.
>
> To decide what is the right thing to do, it is necessary to know how
> (with what encoding) was the queued mail file written.  Looking at
> smtpmail.el, it sounds like it uses the normal code conversions, in
> which case the old code seems correct.  Perhaps the interaction with
> Gnus changes something?

But why should smtpmail.el do any code conversion at all?  Aren't the
queued mails supposed to be written to disk exactly the way they should
be sent to the MTA?

> Could you please look in the queued mail files and see how are they
> encoded on disk?  You could use the `od' utility for that.

The queued mails are stored on disk with the same encoding and CTE as
the MIME headers specify, in this case

        Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
        Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Perhaps I should mention that Gnus uses CTE base64 for everything except
ASCII and iso-2022-jp-* in the default setting -- so unless you
customize `mm-body-charset-encoding-alist' you won't see this bug.

But for me sending Latin-1 as base64 isn't acceptable because a lot of
old mail clients won't be able to decipher it.