Re: e-mail encoding/formatting (was Re: Split-screen mode in mutt?)
On Sun, May 14, 2006 at 02:42:42AM EDT, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Saturday, May 13 at 10:58 PM, quoth cga2000:
> >> ...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...
> >
> > Something is indeed very "wrong". My original message did not contain a
> > capital "A" with what looks like an oblique umlaut on top, followed by
> > something the looks like a capital P facing left instead of right and
> > two legs instead of one..! What I had written was the name "Bjoern",
> > with the "oe" spelled "o" with an umlaut on top.
>
> From my perspective, your previous message to the list contained a
> correctly encoded o-umlaut (ö), and your current one contains a
> correctly encoded A-nyay (Ã) and a correctly encoded paragraph symbol
> (¶) in its place. Try viewing your original message in another mail
> reader, or try checking it out in the web archives (it should be
> correct there). If it got you you in a damaged form, I'm guessing that
> something in your mail configuration is destroying correctly encoded
> mail.
Yes, the previous/original message in the gmane archive has the o-umlaut
alright. And so has your reply - in the gmane archive. But in the copy
of your reply that made it to my mutt-users mbox the o-umlaut has been
replaced by these two characters.
I cannot think of anything in my setup that would alter the contents of
my incoming messages. As far as I know, fetchmail passes the mail
directly to procmail and procmail no longer does any content rewriting
- either directly or indirectly (by changing content-type headers).
Now, on the other hand I have just thought of something. After
switching my locale to UTF-8, I experienced a variety of problems in
various applications such as slrn, elinks.. and possibly xterm/screen.
So quite naturally I have been changing my system's locale repeatedly in
order to test these applications and see how they behaved depending on
my locale settings. No very healthy especially when you realize that I
was changing my locale - and everybody else's for that matter: in debian
this is typically done by the superuser via a dpkg-reconfigure locales
and affects the entire system.. and logging in and out on vt2/vt8 in
order to see how it affected elinks for instance while manually
processing mail in an uninterrupted session on vt1/vt7.
I don't know if/how this could have caused my problem with this
particular message but retrospectively I think this was really asking
for trouble since it could cause different processes on the mail chain
to pick up locale variables with contradictory contents. Or to put it
more simply I was doing stuff that created conditions that the
developers would probably not have provisioned for and as such could
very well lead to unpredictable results.
So this might very well be a non-issue. Proving it would not be too
difficult. I would just need to repeat the process and leave locale
settings alone for a while.
>
> Now, mutt scripts don't generally modify your email, so I'm going to
> guess that the problem isn't mutt. The most likely suspects are either
> your MTA, or your procmailrc.
I need to double-check but I am under the impression that in a fetchmail
+ procmail setup the MTA does not manipulate incoming mail.
> To start with, I'd suggest swapping your
> procmailrc with a very simple one that does only one thing (deliver to
> your inbox) to see if that helps.
I have weeded out most of the stuff that I did not understand from my
.procmailrc. What's left is a bunch of rules to get rid of unsolicited
bulk mail and some other rules that identify mail that comes from
mailing lists and shoves it into the corresponding mailboxes
automatically.
> If it does, you can start adding things back to your procmailrc from
> you old procmailrc until you find out what part of it is destroying
> your email (hint: you probably only need to consider procmail recipes
> that are filter-recipies)
>
Rather drastic approach - but that's pretty much what I had in mind when
I got started.. about 18 hours ago.. just keep the "default rule".. but
then I got a little worried about the impact on my schedule of having
the output of debian-user.. vim@xxxxxxx .. and a few other overactive
mailing lists all ending up in my inbox ..
I'll do it that way as a last resort if I keep getting more of these
weird problems.
> >> Understood. Unfortunately, public mailing lists may be your best
> >> option if you're looking for one-stop shopping.
> >
> > Well this particular one in definitely a great resource.
> >
> > Thank you very much for your explanations.
>
> Happy to help.
Thank you.
cga