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

[Tom Lane]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:
> As I understand it, Tom said his problem was when he forwarded some
> email to someone else and it contained 8-bit characters.  I suspect this
> was done with "forw" (or the Forward button in exmh).

Just for the record, I didn't say that; I rarely use "forw".  The more
common scenario for me is that I'm replying to someone and quoting bits
of their message in-line (as I'm doing here), and the most common specific
gotcha is that somebody's using fancy quotes rather than plain ASCII ones
in the quoted text.

Most of the text-munging involved in that doesn't use nmh at all AFAIK ---
it's all in Emacs MH-Letter mode macros.  And the macro for yanking a
message into the buffer and prefixing "> " to each line doesn't pay any
attention to the headers of said message, so it's not going to absorb any
character set attributions from it.  Fortunately for me, there's little
enough non-UTF8 stuff in my mail traffic that I can afford to ignore the
possibility that what I'm quoting isn't UTF8.

I could probably teach the Emacs code to insert a Content-type header
just before sending, if the buffer contains any non-ASCII characters.
But I don't really see why I should have to, when nmh already contains
exactly the logic I need, it's just not packaged in a
conveniently-controllable way.

                        regards, tom lane