Re: [Nmh-workers] quoted printable. make it stop.

[Ken Hornstein]

>>In the larger sense ... how come you care?  Nowadays pretty much everyone
>>can handle a quoted-printable email just fine.
>
>I can't. :)  Granted, my MH / NMH set-up is probably a decade old by
>now, but I am using "less" as my default pager, and only invoke a
>MIME-complaint reader when I absolutely have to.

Only a decade old?  You're still a youngun'! :-)

FWIW, less is my default pager as well, but with an out-of-the-box setup
and nmh 1.6 you SHOULD be able to handle most text-based MIME messages
easily.

>(Part of me would welcome advice on how to bring my NMH setup into the
>21st century, although I know this is not the proper forum.  The other
>part of me wishes email could be easily read by those of us with a
>VT100 terminal.)

Well, I think this is a reasonable forum; I'm not sure of another one!
I read a lot of email inside of an xterm, which isn't exactly a VT100
(my last VT-series terminal went to electronics recycling years ago when
it died).  But seriously, you should be in reasonably good shape with
only a few minor changes.  Here's an overview:

- Your life will work better if you pick a 8-bit locale.  You SHOULD
  have done this probably 5 years ago, but I know people tend to stick
  with what they know.  If you're unsure what to pick, I recommend
  something like "en_US.UTF-8", assuming your terminal program can handle
  UTF-8.  If you're curious, download:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt

  and view it with "less", or even "cat", and see if it comes out right.

- If you've got your own format files for scan, repl, comp, etc ... consider
  using (or taking from) the ones included with nmh; if yours are old, they
  probably don't include the stuff to decode MIME headers properly.

- By default, "show" will invoke "mhshow" for MIME messages, which will
  do things like decode base64 and quoted printable.  If you have a
  compatible text-based web browser like w3m or lynx, the install process
  will be set up so it uses those to handle text/html content.  Actually,
  I'm kinda surprised that this isn't working for you already.

- For forwarding MIME messages, you really only have two options; dist(1)
  (which some people find confusing) and forw -mime (which requires you
  to run 'mime' at the WhatNow? prompt).  Hopefully we'll do this better
  later on.

- For replying to MIME messages, check out the nmh contrib directory
  for replyfilter.  Read the comments at the top; it should explain how
  to set it up.  You'll need perl and some extra perl packages to make
  it function.

--Ken