I think this may be an advantage of living in a part of the world
where ASCII is too small. Once I got unicode up and working as text,
that is pretty much all I have to worry about. iso-8859 is finally
dying around here, though I still have this mouthful in my .mh_profile
to handle it.
I am still kind of surprised that you don't see more; it seems to me
that a lot of programs want to base64 anything if they see anything with
the high bit set. The mailing list software used here is one example;
it will automatically reencode the message as base64 if it sees any
8-bit characters.
I forgot about quoted printable -- I do get those, but very, very, very
rarely. I never figured out what quoted printable is for.
I believe the idea was that "plain ASCII" would mostly be unencoded, but
presumably the small number of 8-bit characters would have a plain-ASCII
encoding. That's from an era where the existence of mailers that didn't
support MIME was common :-)
The problem is that you typically get your new nmh one day when you, or
maybe the sysadmins at work, do a system-wide update.
Your system admins build nmh for you? Wow!
Since you never
asked for it to get changed, you never noticed that you have a new
version (unless things stop working for some reason). I am not sure what
the best way to handle this is, but these days I am very greatful
when programs come with a --help option, which refers you, amoung other
things, to where the documentation lives.
I'll be the first one to admit that we're not always the best on
documentation, so your point is well taken. It's not clear what the
best strategy is here. We do distribute a NEWS file that lives in the
standard "doc" location (which is probably somewhere close to
$(prefix)/share/doc/nmh), and of course a lot of things are discussed
on this mailing list. Also, the web site has new features when a new
release is announced. And AFAIK every nmh command supports -help, but
it might not have been ... helpful in your case.
replyfilter is kind of in an odd place; I didn't want to introduce a perl
dependency on the distribution, so it lives in "contrib". It requires
a significant change to your configuration; this is especially challenging
in the nmh world, because the configuration can be so customized. Part of
me thinks that a one-time nag that you have a new version of nmh might
be helpful and let you view NEWS, but that might get annoying.
But can I make interleaved comments just as I did on this piece of mail
in some mail that I am forwarding to others?
That sounds more like a "reply" function than a "forward" function. But in
theory, yes, _IF_ you use forw -mime, run "mime" at What now? and then
edit it, you can modify that message before you send it. That message won't
have quote markers; that's something you'll need to add. If your goal
is to maintain the MIME formatting, you will have to take care that you
don't mangle the MIME formatting when you are editing the draft.
--Ken
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