[Nmh-workers] mhshow complaints

[epg]

I added this to my profile in 2004:

#: mhshow sucks; I'll run it by hand if I need to
showmimeproc: mhl

Thinking back, I'm surprised I put up with it for 4 years.
And it turns out I never run mhshow by hand; instead I mhlist and
mhstore, and often view in MH-E.

I've been watching the work to use mhshow by default but
procrastinating looking into it, and then I saw the 1.6 prep
start; better late than never?  Maybe?  :-/

I tried it out on some recent mail, and still hate it.
Not asking to block the 1.6 release, though; surely in most of
the broken cases, pre-1.6 nmh also ran mhshow, so probably none
of this is new.  And thankfully the showmimeproc: mhl trick still
works, so I'll stick with that, for now.  Maybe 1.7 :)

First, it's noisy:

mhshow: extraneous trailing ';' in message 132's Content-Type: parameter list
mhshow: extraneous trailing ';' in message 132's Content-Type: parameter list
mhshow: extraneous trailing ';' in message 186's Content-Type: parameter list
mhshow: extraneous trailing ';' in message 186's Content-Type: parameter list
mhshow: message 593 has multiple MIME-Version: fields

Why the heck should I care about that?  Complaining multiple
times, too!  Just tolerate it and get on with it.

It refuses to show plain text parts it doesn't think are text
based on the media type:

mhshow: don't know how to display content
        (content message/delivery-status in message 641, part 2)

I guess the answer would be a registry of standard and common
types that are plain text?  Sounds like a pain to build...

And then there's this weirdness (from the same delivery-status message):

mhshow: Can't convert unicode-1-1-utf-7 to UTF-8
mhshow: unable to convert character set of part 1 to unicode-1-1-utf-7, 
continuing...

As far as I can tell, it actually did decode and show the
content.  So what is it complaining about?

The delivery-status message is a "mailbox full" message from AOL.
Surprisingly, at least one person still uses AOL, and they
probably have some crazy small mailbox size.  I can forward it to
Ken or anyone else who wants a look at it, but would rather not
post it to the list.

Thanks.