Re: [nmh-workers] mhshow: invalid BASE64 encoding in --

[Ken Hornstein]

>With irony, in a discussion about how to handle bad encodings in
>mail, I found that I could not read this message by Valdis Klētnieks
>https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2019-03/msg00023.html
>
>Something bad seems to have happened to his encoding of a '§'.

Here are my thoughts about this.

First ..... Valdis, really?  You wrote a BITNET relay ... in Pascal, man.
But the email you sent out was marked as having a character set of UTF-8
with characters encoded as ISO-8859-1.  Dude, I know you could do better
(also, I am puzzled as to how that happened; I think with nmh you'd have
to work to make that happen).

>Now, my .mh_profile says (all one line, but I made it more readable).
>[...]

You may not be aware, but nmh has had built-in iconv support for a while
now; you're free to do whatever you want, but you might find it easier to
use that.  But anyway ...

>When my mail blows up, I just pop into .mh_profile, add the -c flag, and
>then find out what it was that Valdis wanted to tell us.  Then I take it
>out again so I can be informed when iconv next runs into problems.

I hope you would understand that I would say this ... is not a desirable
user interface.  It might be the exact opposite of that, actually.

>But the behaviour I want is one that iconv doesn't give you.  Scream
>informatively about the problem and then continue on as if it never
>happened.  I want the message that I get without the -c flag and then
>the -c behaviour.

Well, with the built-in iconv, we don't do that exactly.  We do pretty
much behave like every other MUA in this regard, though.  When you
use the built-in iconv if the input character cannot be converted
into the target character set, it gets replaced with a substitution
character (which is normally just a '?'). This has the advantage of
mostly continuing on without problems.  We don't scream loudly, but
honestly I think that is lousy behavior (I am not aware of a MUA that
does that, and I can't really think of reason why that behavior is
desirable).

--Ken