Re: RMAIL bails out with coding-system-error

[Simon Josefsson]

David Kuehling <address@hidden> writes:

> BTW, the origin of the reported occurence of that bug seems to be the
> use of Mule-UCS.  In rmail.el, line 1660, the following code is used to
> add an X-Coding-System header to mails, using the last coding system
> used:
>
>            (insert "X-Coding-System: "
>                    (symbol-name last-coding-system-used)
>                    "\n")))
>
> When I received the mail, the last coding system I used was one of the
> coding systems that came with Mule-UCS.  After temporaryly disabling
> Mule-UCS, that coding system wasn't known any more...
>
> Using the last coding system is after all a little confusing.  Maybe
> `default-buffer-file-coding-system' would be a better (and more
> predictable) choice?

Is this X-Coding-System header actually used by RMAIL for anything?

I think the header is a very bad idea and it should be removed.  There
is a standard for interchanging non-ASCII data using email, and it is
called MIME.  Inventing something new that is specific to emacs (and
can even depend on which additional packages are installed..) is a
perfect method to cause problems for users and make people reject the
entire software because it doesn't follow standards.  Gnus provides
two supposedly standalone packages called Message and Emacs MIME which
provides MIME encoding and decoding, can't RMAIL use them?