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

[Carlos Morgado <chbm chbm nu>]

On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 09:35:40PM +0100, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> Am 08.02.03 20:11 schrieb(en) Carlos Morgado:
> > i may be having a memory lapse here but i think rfc clearly states
> > us-ascii unless told otherwise.
> 
> No, no, you are **absolutely** right here!! A mail without mime headers 
> *must* not contain anything else but us-ascii. Full stop. So there is a 
> really good reason to pop up a warning if balsa displays such a mail.
> 
> The problem is that there *are* broken sending mua's (not only web 
> mailers), and it is annoying to see all those "?" with balsa 2. Assuming a 
> reasonable 8-bit charset would not do anything more than emulating balsa 

problem is, all iso8859 looks the same :) what exactly is a reasonable
charset ?

> 1's behaviour. Currently, when I get one of those mails (among others a 
> local cinema's program sent by a broken perl script, which is *no* spam 
> ;-)), I shut down balsa 2 and run balsa 1 to read it. As balsa 1 does not 
> use utf8, it silently uses the current locale's charset for displaying 
> such mails.
> 

it's a bit deeper than that, balsa1 uses the font you chose and
that includes an encoding. the sideefect is it gets rather hard to display
any other encoding. (so you might think it's actually a bug ;))
on gnome2 you choose a font set that is supposed to have all encodings
so yeah, we'd have to default to locale. 
right, that was a bit of a rambling and got lost off track. point being
it's a balsa source thing, not a libmutt thing :)
anyways, you got a vaild point. i guess it deserves a checkbox
in preferences :)

-- 
Carlos Morgado - chbm(at)chbm(dot)nu - http://chbm.nu/ -- gpgkey: 0x1FC57F0A 
http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/ FP:0A27 35D3 C448 3641 0573 6876 2A37 4BB2 1FC5 7F0A
UNIX is user friendly. It's just very carefull choosing his friends.