Re: [Nmh-workers] I like neither green eggs and ham nor MIME

[Ken Hornstein]

>7. Stored the result in UTF-8.

I think this the problem.  What you sent out was definitely NOT UTF-8, but
ISO-8859-1.  Which makes me think your editor, or maybe something before
the text got to your editor, was the problem.

>UTF-8 has the virtue that it represents ASCII characters in ASCII. But now you
>tell me that not even UTF-8 is good enough. So what format do you want me to
>use to for writing EMail destined text?

Well ... here was a case where what you sent was probably not what you
intended; the email indicated that the text content was in UTF-8, but
the actual bytes were ISO-8859-1.  I, personally, do not case whether or
not you send out email in UTF-8, or ISO-8859-1, or KOI8-R.  All I care
about is that the charset that your email is labelled actually matches
the bytes in your email (since I'm UTF-8, my nmh installation can handle
pretty much any character set); I'd presume you care about that as well,
because if they mismatch then people won't be interpreting your email
properly.  For what it's worth, it's relatively straightforward to
override the character set on a per-message basis.

In the larger sense, I want people to be able to use nmh effectively,
and to be able to read and compose mail with international character sets.
In a perfect world, it would work perfectly for everyone out of the box;
we're not quite there yet.  If it's not working for someone, I'd like
to understand why so we can make it better.  That's why I'm asking what
went wrong here.  But this doesn't sound fundamentally like a nmh problem;
it sounds like something went wrong between where you took the text
from my original message and incorporated it into your reply.

--Ken