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

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Mon, 17 Oct 2016 21:41:08 +0100, Ralph Corderoy writes:
>Hi Laura,
>
>> Just giving them utf-8 even though that wasn't what they asked for has
>> fixed a huge number of headaches when running mailing lists around
>> here.
>
>Does that mailing-list software check that what they're sending out is
>valid for the encoding they claim, UTF-8?  Or when replying to an ISO
>8859-13 do they send invalid UTF-8 back?
>
>-- 
>Cheers, Ralph.
>https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy

It does some checking.  I'm pretty sure that I could construct some cases
that would break it, but there was no great demand for that.  While, on
the other hand, mail that claims to be US-ASCII but is really UTF-8
happens all the time.  The weekly report from the Python bug tracker,
for instance, insists that its mail is US-ASCII no matter how many bug
reports that I send about the fact that people are signing their bug
reports with their non-ASCII names.

Things may be different where you are, but around here, when there is a
difference of opinion between what the encoding says, and what the
content has inside it, and the encoding is US-ASCII, the encoding is
always wrong.  "You got an 8-bit char in your mail by mistake" is not
a common problem here, and, when it does occur, it's not a problem that
people care about, or rather they care about it just as much as they do
about any other typo in their mail -- if they didn't run the thing
through a spell checker, then it wasn't one of those important pieces
of mail where perfection in content matters, but more like this one,
where if I make a typo, I will trust that you will suffer through
it with no long term ill effects.

Laura