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

[Paul Fox]

ken wrote:
 > > > 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.
 > >
 > >your ideas intrigue me, and i'd like to subscribe to your newsletter!
 > 
 > Heh, sorry for getting too technical ... the short answer is "those
 > things are designed to work with any mailer, and as far as I've seen
 > nmh has no problems with them".

heh.  no, not too technical at all.  my comment was more of an attempt at
a wry "huh, you say it simply works, and always has?  tell me more!" :-)

 > 
 > >you're absolutely right that i've been tweaking the same forms for
 > >probably 20 years now, and totally missed this modernization.  i
 > >assumed this was all part of the "gotta finally get this mime stuff
 > >happening" push that's hoped-for-soon.  silly me.
 > 
 > I was curious, so I went back and looked ... while MH-6.8.5 couldn't
 > decode RFC 2047-encoded headers, that code was added by Richard
 > Coleman .... in 1998.  So every release of nmh since 1999 has had
 > support for that :-)

yeah, "git blame" told me the same story last night, while i was diagnosing
my MM_CHARSET issue.  i guess i just thought mh was mime-unaware in so
many aspects that i shouldn't expect that to work.  it wouldn't have
mattered, though, since i only finally got the rest of my working
environment -- locales, terminal programs, editor configuration -- to
be fully utf8 aware during the past few months.  yeah, so, i'm a
little slow.

i noticed that the provided mhl.* and scan.* and repl*comps aren't
uniform in their use of "decode" for address fields.  for instance, To
and Cc headers don't ever use it, and From and Reply-to are
inconsistent as well.  is there any reason not to simply use it
everywhere?

 > 
 > >however:  that being said, neither your one-liner above, nor a 
 > >"scan -form <nmh-etc-dir>/scan.default" of the messages in question
 > >does the right thing.  clearly they should, so clearly now the problem
 > >is on my end.
 > 
 > I see that you figured out it was MM_CHARSET, which leads me to ask
 > another question.  I don't actually use MM_CHARSET myself; if it's not
 > set then nmh simply falls back to using your locale setting (assuming
 > you have support for the nl_langinfo() function).  Why do people use
 > MM_CHARSET instead of just their locale setting?

as alexander said, i think i do it because the man page says to.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 71.1 degrees)