Re: Rmail-mbox branch

[Francesco Potorti`]

>[3]  For practical purposes we can assume that message bodies which are
>'text/plain; charset=XYZ' for XYZ=iso-8859-1, XYZ=iso-8859-15, and
>XYZ=utf-8 will generally "just work", too.  But it's easy to imagine
>situations where a MIME-conforming MUA might render such incorrectly
>without a MIME Content-Type header to guide it, such as a Latin-2-
>using locale.

One thing that I find useful is searching mbox files using standard Unix
text tools.  This is not possible for base-64 coded messages.  However,
I can edit an mbox file, convert its text from base-64 and edit the MIME
header appropriately, thus still obtaining an RFC-compliant message that
is searchable and that can be displayed without further decoding (it is
smaller, too).  I do this routinely for the three charsets you mentioned
above, but it should work for any charset.  I suggest that this
conversion be made automatically whenever possible and sensible.