Re: [Nmh-workers] repl and mime handling

[Aleksander Matuszak]

Joel Uckelman writes:

> Thus spake Oliver Kiddle:
> > 
> > The limitations occur where e-mails use characters that can't be
> > displayed in the current locale but we can't do anything about that.
> > 
> How likely is it that a message containing characters undisplayable in 
> the user's locale will be useful for the user? (This isn't meant
> rhetorically, it's a serious question.) 

This is not that simple. For years I enforced displaying iso-8859-1
charset on terminal supporting only iso-8859-2 and it works.

1. Charset declared in mail header. Quite a lot of people have
incorrectly configured charset. 

2. Language of the message. Might be different than charset suggests.
For almost any charset basic ASCII is the same, so message writen
in English would be readable.

3. Rare non-latin characters (e.g. names, cities) may enforce MUA
to switch to another charset, while the almost whole text is
readable.

On the other end, message written in (say) Japanese would be
unreadable even perfectly displayed =:-) But the same would
happen in case of message written in foreign language that use
the same charset as mine.

This is not so strong relation: supported charset => readable
message. 

   Max


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