Re: [Nmh-workers] why does mhfixmsg dislike long text lines?

[Ken Hornstein]

>The comment in mhfixmsg which I quoted at the beginning of this thread
>seems to be saying that sometimes message components described as text/*
>are really binary files, and that the 998-character limit is used in
>mhfixmsg (only) as a heuristic to identify this situation.

Well, "binary" has a specific meaning in the MIME world.  Specifically,
it refers to a MIME Content Transfer Encoding of binary, which has no
restrictions in terms of line length.  So when that message says that
it can't decode it because the part would have to be binary, THAT is what
it is referring to.

But David points out that if you tell it to, mhfixmsg will happily
generate such messages (but the documentation does caution you that the
resulting messages may not be readable with nmh).

One of my medium-term plans is to redo the mail parser with more modern
tools so nmh doesn't have such limits.  Don't ask me when that will
happen, though.

>The only reason I've been writing to nmh-workers is that I'm unaware
>of anywhere else to turn.  Is there a corresponding nmh-users list or
>something similar?

Our only general-purpose nmh list is nmh-workers; plenty of people on it
are not coders, so please don't be concerned on that score.

--Ken