Hi kre,
If the draft contained Content-Type, right from the beginning (either
auto set as part of repl or comp processing, or manually inserted),
then we wouldn't need to be guessing what charset it was using, would
we?
Yes, we would need to guess because the Content-Type only describes the
content part following the fields but we need to know the encoding to
read the fields themselves, e.g. non-ASCII runes in email addresses.
But we shouldn't guess, we should use the user's locale to build a
draft, e.g. for repl(1), so the user's locale-aware editor is happy, and
to parse the draft, whether nmh built it or something else.
So my thinking is the spool-file's writer will either be something
like Postfix which declares support for SMTPUTF8, is handed UTF-8,
and AFAICS stores it verbatim,
On my system the spool file is written by /usr/libexec/mail.local
(which would be invoked by postfix if I used that) but can also be run
from anything.
While the most common practice is to get to it via the system's MTA,
it also gets invoked by other things, and will write whatever messages
they hand it (doing no processing other than inserting the mail spool
"From ..." separator line and '>' quoting a leading "From " on any
other line).
Then I think my point stands and it's just the responsibility passes
upstream of the near-transparent file-locking mail.local, whether that's
Postfix or not.
--
Cheers, Ralph.