Steve -
Thanks for your comments. You needn't convince me; I've been involved
with the MIME charset issue for a long time (you'll note that I am one of the
authors of the ISO-2022-JP spec). In defense of the other Pine team members,
the sin is one of omission rather than of comission; they wanted to do
something about character sets and didn't want to wire in a table of legal
values (since it might change).
I've suggested that as a first pass the charset should only be settable
in the system config file, and that the charset always be coerced to US-ASCII
unless the text contains 8-bit characters and/or has ``funny'' control
characters such as ESC or SI/SO. More work would definitely be needed in this
area, but you'll appreciate that there are other, higher priorities just
now...
-- Mark --