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

[David Levine]

Laura wrote:

> I don't know about Tom, but my problem isn't that I want to send valid
> US-ASCII emails, but that I _never_ want to send valid us-ascii emails.

> And the last thing I want to happen is for nmh to not be able to
> tell what I want, stick in us-ascii (because the thing needs a
> content header, and that's the default),

Just to note that without the Content-Type and MIME-Version
headers, the message is assumed to be us-ascii.

> and then give me grief because the mail I assembled with some script somewhere
> contained lots of invalid us-ascii.

mhbuild should do the right thing if you run it after putting
everything into your draft.  But I understand that some, including
me, add to the draft after running mhbuild (mime at the What Now?
prompt).

> I thought that mh_profile would be a good place to send a love letter to
> nmh.  "Dear nmh. I see that you cleverly concluded that I wanted
> us-ascii.  Alas, you were wrong.  Just be a good chap and give me utf-8.
> Thank you."

I don't think the locale profile entry (and $NMH_LANG) will do
what you want.  Perhaps what you want is to do what Ralph does,
and put something similar this in your components files:

    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

But only if you don't use attach at the What Now? prompt.  If you do, I
think that we want to figure out how to force mhbuild to always go 8bit,
with an appropriate charset.  There should be an easy way, such as a
signature block with at least one 8-bit character in it.  (Or with current
HEAD on master and upcoming 1.7, a message header with such.)

David