Re: [Nmh-workers] question about encoded recipient names

[Ken Hornstein]

> > Those RFC 2407 encodings are designed to be RFC 822 "atoms" and as
> > a result the handling of them in old decrepit mailers like mh should
> > just work :-); in terms of the header parser routines they should
> > handle them fine.  That's always been my experience.
>
>your ideas intrigue me, and i'd like to subscribe to your newsletter!

Heh, sorry for getting too technical ... the short answer is "those
things are designed to work with any mailer, and as far as I've seen
nmh has no problems with them".

>you're absolutely right that i've been tweaking the same forms for
>probably 20 years now, and totally missed this modernization.  i
>assumed this was all part of the "gotta finally get this mime stuff
>happening" push that's hoped-for-soon.  silly me.

I was curious, so I went back and looked ... while MH-6.8.5 couldn't
decode RFC 2047-encoded headers, that code was added by Richard
Coleman .... in 1998.  So every release of nmh since 1999 has had
support for that :-)

>however:  that being said, neither your one-liner above, nor a 
>"scan -form <nmh-etc-dir>/scan.default" of the messages in question
>does the right thing.  clearly they should, so clearly now the problem
>is on my end.

I see that you figured out it was MM_CHARSET, which leads me to ask
another question.  I don't actually use MM_CHARSET myself; if it's not
set then nmh simply falls back to using your locale setting (assuming
you have support for the nl_langinfo() function).  Why do people use
MM_CHARSET instead of just their locale setting?

--Ken