Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh 1.6: character set checks and exmh compatibility

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Mon, 17 Oct 2016 13:42:37 -0400, Ken Hornstein writes:
>Also, it kind of strikes me as the wrong solution, and not just because
>of the additional complexity.  The locale setting is supposed to
>indicate to utilities which character set you're using.  So we (rather
>reasonably, I would argue) use that in nmh to determine the character
>set for input and display.  If you're putting an 8-bit character into
>a message when you've told us that you are always going to be sending
>US-ASCII ... well, what are we supposed to do?  That seems like an error
>condition to me.  You can explicitly override the character set in your
>draft for a single message (see mhbuild(1)) if you want to do something
>different for individual messages, but absent that I think going with the
>locale character set is the only solution.
>
>--Ken

The problem is that most of the time people who have the locale US-ASCII
set do so when what they want is 'English, US or Brit doesn't matter,
but keep all the extra characters that other people are using when,
for instance writing their names'.  They don't want their mail to fall over
because they are replying to Åsa Krigström in Nyköping.

Just giving them utf-8 even though that wasn't what they asked for
has fixed a huge number of headaches when running mailing lists
around here.

Laura