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Re: mhfixmsg: possible bugette, -textcharset/-replacetextplain questions

2019-12-26 22:49:25
 - I'm contemplating running the above command on my entire email
   archive; is there any reason not to use "-textcharset utf-8" on
   everything?  Seems to me like an eminently sensible thing to do on
   the face of it, as without it trying to read emails containing
   (heaven forfend) mixed encodings is asking for trouble.  Think
   that's been mentioned here before as a source of headaches.

I am not sure what you mean, because (assuming your nmh is built with
iconv which it almost certainly is) assuming you have a "normal" nmh
setup and you don't do anything weird in your profile, character set
conversion to your native character set should "just work".  Also,
I don't know what you mean by "mixed encoding", unless you mean two
different text/plain parts in the same message with different encodings.
That is possible, but I have never seen it (well, maybe I have, because
I wouldn't notice it, but I think it would be hard to generate unless
you did it explictly).

People who have problems with emails in different character sets seem to
be (in my experience) mostly self-inflicted problems.  The two big ones
are "I set some stuff in my profile 25 years ago to deal with different
character sets and it turns out it doesn't work right for everything",
and "I set my locale to 'C' but I really want everything output as
UTF-8".  I don't really understand the latter one, but more than one
person had that setup (I never really saw a comprehensible explanation
as to why things were that way).

We used to deal with character set conversion failures poorly; that
was a huge problem for the "I want to display UTF-8 but keep my locale
character set 'C'" crowd.  We now recover and insert a substitution
character.

If you want to convert everything to UTF-8 that is of course your business,
I am just pointing out that show(1) should work fine on any message that
mhfixmsg can process.

--Ken

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