On 5 February 1998 at 19:02, Richard Coleman
<coleman(_at_)math(_dot_)gatech(_dot_)edu> wrote:
|Currently nmh doesn't have any method to allow you to specify the
|Content-Transfer-Encoding.
But the real question is what flexibility do people really need?
Just the abilities to say "always use 8bit"? Or the ability to
give a default encoding for every content type? Or both (which
is complicated).
I'm surprised that there don't seem to be any replies to your question,
Richard. I've heard gripes about this since MH got MIME capability years
ago. I usually just write ASCII text, so I'm not a good one to answer.
This *is* important; maybe you should ask for feedback on comp.mail.mh?
My main gripe is how mhn chooses quoted-printable for things like patch
files and other stuff that should be sent as 7- or 8-bit text/plain.
What form should this take? Do people want the ability to specify
the encoding inside a mhbuild directive like this?
#<text/plain; charset=iso-8859-5 {8bit}
That would help a lot. I think mhn (sorry, no mhbuild; we're still at
nmh-0.14 on my college's machines) makes decent default choices for
users who don't want to think about encodings -- or, more important,
for users who don't understand encodings and may do something dumb.
For instance, maybe they'd specify {8bit} but their MTA won't pass it.
Adding something like {8bit} to mhbuild directives would be great for
people like me who compose MIME messages inside vi or prompter. It might
not be great for users with interfaces like mh-e or exmh. They may
never see mhbuild directives and may be forced to specify encodings in
their .mh_profile files or on some menu somewhere.
Hope those rambles help a little.
--
Jerry Peek, jpeek(_at_)jpeek(_dot_)com, http://www.jpeek.com/~jpeek/
[If jpeek.com refuses your email (sorry!), use
jpeek(_at_)ix(_dot_)netcom(_dot_)com]