Re: [Nmh-workers] Understanding nmh (aka. What's the goal) [ really non-ASCII message bodies ]

[Earl Hood]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Correct me if my memory is failing me here, I'm being lazy and not rereading
> rfcs at the moment because I have other things to do.
>
> I recall that in the absence of appropriate headers messages are defined as
> ASCII.  If that's the case, it strikes me that you're "fixing" something that
> is convenient for you but technically not broken.

In the ideal world, what you have stated is true.  However, in the
real world, in non-English locales, character data occurs in
headers that not encoded according to MIME rules.

In my Perl app, I added an option to specify what is the default
character encoding to assume for non-encoded data.  The default
value is us-ascii (as the rfcs state), but the user can change
it to something else.

Not sure if nmh needs something similar, but if there are
users in non-English locales that have messages with non-English
non-encoded data in header fields, then allowing to specify
a default encoding to assume may be of use.

--ewh