Re: [Nmh-workers] question about encoded recipient names

[Ken Hornstein]

>is mh transparent to encoded receipient names?  i.e., if i receive a
>mail message containing a recipient name such as:
>
>   =?iso-8859-1?Q?Rickard_Ekl=F6f?= <address@hidden>
>or
>   =?big5?B?TWFycyBDaGFuZyixabnFpOUp?= <address@hidden>
>
>can i assume that string hasn't been munged in any way by mh, and that
>if i simply reply, then recipients of the new message will see that
>name correctly rendered?  (assuming they're not running mh ;-)
>i.e., i'm hoping this is strictly a presentation issue in mh, and not
>something deeper.

Those RFC 2407 encodings are designed to be RFC 822 "atoms" and as
a result the handling of them in old decrepit mailers like mh should
just work :-); in terms of the header parser routines they should
handle them fine.  That's always been my experience.

>also, is there a simple way to manually render these encodings, in
>order to see what they really look like?

I guess you've had your own custom scan format and mhl format forever?
The ones shipped with newer versions of nmh can do it for you automatically;
check out the "decode" mh-format function and the same option for mhl.

If you just want to decode one header, try:

$(libdir)/ap -format '%(decode(friendly{text}))' '<To/From header>'

--Ken