Hi,
Earl Hood writes:
Some general comments about this discussion:
- Message should be stored in their original forms. I.e. The
character encoding transformation should only be done for
display/access purposes.
Main reasons:
- Protects against bugs in encoding transformation code. The
original message is always left untouched.
- Maintains compatibility with folks that use external tools and
scripts to access nmh messages.
- Avoids invalidating any digital signatures since any
modification of the message will invalidate them.
If there is a desire to support transformation of incoming mail, so
mail is stored in "normalized form", then it should be a configurable
option. I personally would not want all my stored email converted to
UTF-8 due to reasons cited above.
Not to take things too far off-topic, but in my wild imaginings I've
wondered how practical it would be to implement a mail client that
used a mh mail store as a base to expose a filesystem (maybe over FUSE
or 9P) that contains individual messages as decoded UTF-8 text files,
and sub-hierarchies as necessary for attachments/MIME, however that
would work.
It seems like a lot of room for error in implementation. But talk about
satisfying the Unix philosophy...
--
Anthony J. Bentley
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