Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh 1.6: character set checks and exmh compatibility

[Ken Hornstein]

>So I updated to the new RHEL6 package of nmh 1.6 (had been on 1.5).
>I've found that it now wants to mime-ify outgoing mail and among
>other things attaches
>       Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>Apparently, it's also trying to enforce that by rejecting any
>non-plain-ASCII content.  This is a real pain, mainly because whatever
>it's doing isn't playing well with exmh: the post simply silently doesn't
>happen.  That's several notches below the already pretty awful handling
>of post errors that I was used to.

AFAIK, when send doesn't happen you should always get an error, and an
exit with a non-zero error code.  Certainly when a send fails for me
with exmh I always know about it.  This is assuming you don't use -push.
So if this is failing, then that's a bug.  If you're using -push ... well,
then what is happening is exactly what is supposed to be happening :-/

Hm, in theory I see that you're supposed to get email back when push
fails.  I'm not sure that's been tested in like forever.  I'm not actually
sure what is supposed to do that.  Ah, alright ... I see there's an alert()
function in uip/sendsbr.c.  I suspect we're not calling that if mhbuild
fails.

>I don't usually compose mail that isn't straight ASCII, but I've already
>been burnt twice this morning by trying to forward text that included
>a stray UTF8 character or two.
>
>Any suggestions on how to improve this?  Ideally I'd like it to pass
>through what it's told to, perhaps changing the charset marking to
>utf8 when necessary.

Well, that's what supposed to happen, and that's what happens for me.

I have a strong suspicion that if you were to get the error back (e.g.,
not use -push if you are), it might show something like this:

Text content contains 8 bit characters, but character set is US-ASCII

Which would happen if (a) you put an 8-bit character in your draft, and
(b) your locale is set to US-ASCII.  Nmh takes the character set to use
out of the user's locale.  If you're forwarding an email without using
MIME forwarding, then nmh doesn't have any idea what the character set
should be; that might be a problem because it could guess wrong.

Solutions include:

- Using MIME forwarding (forw -mime)
- Setting an 8-bit locale, but you might get the character set wrong there.

If things are really crapping out with no error and you're not using -push,
clearly that's a bug we need to fix.  Also, I guess we should probably send
an error email if -push is being used and mhbuild fails.

--Ken