Hi Kirill,

Kirill Miazine wrote on Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 12:52:52PM +0200:

> you may not even need -m, and instead inspect LC_CTYPE environment 
> variable and add appropriate headers for UTF-8. according to locale(1), 
> LC_CTYPE may be set to indicate UTF-8:
> 
> If the value of LC_CTYPE ends in ‘.UTF-8’, programs in the OpenBSD base 
> system ignore the beginning of it, treating for example zh_CN.UTF-8 
> exactly like en_US.UTF-8.

This is definitely very bad advice.  Whether the user uses an UTF-8
locale for their shell and terminal has nothing to do with whether
they want to be send UTF-8 encoded mail with MIME headers.
For example, i'm using LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 for my shells and
terminals most of the time, but i do not want the low-level mail(1)
MUA to suddenly start sending UTF-8 mail without being specifically
asked to.

I just checked - even though i'm using the higer-level mutt(1) MUA
most of the time and even though the shell i'm starting mutt(1) from
has LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 set on that particular machine, the last sixteen
mails i sent all contained the explicit header

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

and intentionally so.  Yes, i do occasionally send UTF-8 mail on
purpose, mostly in highly technical messages that need to display
particular Unicode characters in addition to mentioning their
codepoints in the U+[XX]XXXX form, and rarely, sending UTF-8 happens
inadvertently because mutt(1) contains some weird autodetection logic -
but what you set your terminal to and what you use for sending mail
are clearly completely unrelated topics.

Yours,
  Ingo

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