Re: [patch] be more liberal in accepting wrongly encoded national chars

[Albrecht Dreß <albrecht dress arcor de>]

Am 08.02.03 15:21 schrieb(en) Peter Bloomfield:
> 1. Does ISO-8859-1 have some official status as a preferred superset of 
> US-ASCII?

Not really... This is just a charset which works for me and will do so for 
most people getting broken mails containing characters from western 
european languages. However, I sometimes get spam with (apparently) 
chinese encodings, and there this method will fail. The best would be to 
add a config option how these mails should be treated, but I guess it's 
difficult to pass this downstream to libmutt.

> 2. Since Balsa tries to conform to standards, would there be some way to 
> warn the user when nonstandard actions are taken, i.e., when non-ascii 
> text is encountered but successfully decoded as ISO-8859-1?

pine inserts a text telling the user that the mail contains chars in an 
unknown encoding. Balsa sould of course display a dialog, but again it's 
difficult to pass this upstream from libmutt. An idea would be adding a 
custom header (like "X-assume-mime-charset: ISO-8859-1") which is 
perfectly legal.

> Of course, the patch should still be a one-liner ;-)

I guess the task is **much** bigger if we want (and we should!!) to stick 
to standards. This one-liner is just a quick hack. I think I'll have to 
look at this a little more carefully. Stay tuned...

Thanks, Albrecht.

-- 
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  Albrecht Dreß  -  Johanna-Kirchner-Straße 13  -  D-53123 Bonn (Germany)
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