Re: e-mail encoding/formatting (was Re: Split-screen mode in mutt?)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Thursday, May 11 at 12:56 AM, quoth cga2000:
> Interestingly, I just had the problem today.. I was asking the slrn
> mailing list if there was anything I needed to configure for slrn to
> display non-ascii characters correctly. I had found one example of
> an article whose author's first name was Björn something - correctly
> displayed in mozilla-mail - and in slrn the "ö" was rendered as a
> vertical rectangle on my display. Now, when the message came back to
> me from the mailing list, the "ö" was rendered by an "=F6".
...what's wrong with that? If, as you say, your encoding was set to
"iso-8859-1", that's the correct quoted-printable encoding for "ö".
I'm not sure I understand the problem...
> So I thought I should check the encoding that mutt generates just
> before my messages are sent (I sent a copy of this same message to
> myself and hit 'v' just before hitting 'y'.. ) and I noticed that
> the encoding was "text/plain 8-bit iso-8859-1".. So I said to
> myself.. this can't be right.. this is not "plain text" at least as
> I understand it.. shouldn't it be "quoted-printable", maybe..?
If you check, this message I'm sending should be sent as text/plain,
8-bit, iso-8859-1. Quoted-printable is, officially, "plain" text, even
though that seems rather odd. Basically, it's "plain" text because it
is not html and it's not RTF (rich text format).
> So I looked for some way I could control this.. and I found a
> boolean that is not set by default: "encode-from". I'm not sure I
> understand the explanations in the mutt manual, but I thought I
> could run the same test and see if it helps.
The $encode_from variable is a workaround for bad mbox parsers (or bad
mbox writers). In mbox format, all messages begin with a line that
begins "From ". Many mbox parsers use that to figure out where each
new message begins. This of course has the problem that sometimes the
message body can contain a line that begins with that same string. One
way around this problem is to include a "Content-Length" header or
something similar in the message header, allowing the mbox
reader/parser to know to skip X number of bytes before expecting the
next "From ", but some mbox writers don't add that header, and some
mbox readers ignore such headers. On the other hand, if you can turn
"From " in the message body into "=45rom ", all good mail readers will
decode that quoted-printable transparently, and the message will be
parsed correctly even by very simple mbox readers. That's what that
flag does.
> I haven't done so yet, but I would like to fix at least this. It is
> rather annoying to see my *own* messages come back garbled. Because if
> they are messed up on my display, I would imagine it increases the
> probability that they also are for everybody else that receives them.
It doesn't *sound* like your messages are garbled (this one certainly
isn't). What makes you think they are?
> I was looking for something that would have reliable up-to-date info
> on the subject in one place. One frustrating aspect is that you can
> end up spending more time looking for bits and pieces of doc and
> putting them together than actually studying it.
Understood. Unfortunately, public mailing lists may be your best
option if you're looking for one-stop shopping.
~Kyle
- --
The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy
appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
-- Ronald Reagan
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Thank you for using encryption!
iD8DBQFEYzmiBkIOoMqOI14RAphGAJ9gv5U8x/RKAmpn8Bks/+5olRq0ygCg/Lwd
FpnSMxGORzgDFRkX3dcm+iE=
=8ykp
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----