Re: [nmh-workers] mhl.format mystery

[Ken Hornstein]

>The following mhl.format file works fine for only message 31 and no other
>messages downloaded.

Quick question ... is it possible that message 31 is not a MIME message,
and every OTHER message in your mailbox is a MIME message?  A non-MIME
message might contain a Content-Type header, but it would just have a
Content-Type of text/plain, a charset of US-ASCII, and a
Content-Transfer-Encoding of 7bit or 8bit.

If that's the case, check out the man page for mhshow and look at
mhl.headers.

And what is going on here?  Well, back a million years ago or so, very
few messages were MIME messages, so "show" worked fine.  Along the way
when MH became "nmh", the command mhshow was added that could handle
MIME messages better and show was modified to call mhshow when it found
a MIME message. mhshow works very differently than show, and it DOES
use mhl, but just to display the headers.  So if you want to change the
way headers are displayed you end up needing to modify mhl.format AND
mhl.headers.

I'll be the first one to admit this is "less than ideal".  Really, what
SHOULD be happening is mhshow should go away and mhl should be able to
handle MIME messages; that fits into the original design of MH much better.
Hopefully I'll be able to tackle that in the Great Mime Rewrite (I don't
know when that will happen, though).

--Ken