>With irony, in a discussion about how to handle bad encodings in >mail, I found that I could not read this message by Valdis Klētnieks >https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2019-03/msg00023.html > >Something bad seems to have happened to his encoding of a '§'.
Here are my thoughts about this. First ..... Valdis, really? You wrote a BITNET relay ... in Pascal, man. But the email you sent out was marked as having a character set of UTF-8 with characters encoded as ISO-8859-1. Dude, I know you could do better (also, I am puzzled as to how that happened; I think with nmh you'd have to work to make that happen). >Now, my .mh_profile says (all one line, but I made it more readable). >[...] You may not be aware, but nmh has had built-in iconv support for a while now; you're free to do whatever you want, but you might find it easier to use that. But anyway ... >When my mail blows up, I just pop into .mh_profile, add the -c flag, and >then find out what it was that Valdis wanted to tell us. Then I take it >out again so I can be informed when iconv next runs into problems. I hope you would understand that I would say this ... is not a desirable user interface. It might be the exact opposite of that, actually. >But the behaviour I want is one that iconv doesn't give you. Scream >informatively about the problem and then continue on as if it never >happened. I want the message that I get without the -c flag and then >the -c behaviour. Well, with the built-in iconv, we don't do that exactly. We do pretty much behave like every other MUA in this regard, though. When you use the built-in iconv if the input character cannot be converted into the target character set, it gets replaced with a substitution character (which is normally just a '?'). This has the advantage of mostly continuing on without problems. We don't scream loudly, but honestly I think that is lousy behavior (I am not aware of a MUA that does that, and I can't really think of reason why that behavior is desirable). --Ken -- nmh-workers https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
