ISO-8859-1 mails getting marked as UTF-8

[Alain Bench]

Hello Werner,

 On Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 9:17:59 +0100, Werner Koch wrote:

> Yes there is the Charset armor header but that one is not supported by
> GnuPG because it is a kludge not required since 15 years or so (since
> MIME).

    A charsethacked Mutt can make use of this Charset armor header, if
it exists. Or make use of a MIME charset label, if it exists. Or assume
UTF-8 otherwise. Mutt then converts accordingly the text to the display.
This doesn't impact signature verification, which is done before the
conversion.

    And when sending, Mutt sets the MIME charset label, as a hint for
the recipient.

    This scheme is not half as robust as PGP/MIME, of course. But in
practice works rather well in cooperation with various other mailers.
Comparing it with traditional PGP in the straight Mutt (forcing UTF-8)
is not crystal clear: One will fail in some cases where the other works,
and the contrary. The balance seems in favour of the charsethack,
though. The standard hurts interoperability, unfortunately.


> Please use PGP/MIME and the semantics of your message are well
> defined.

    If the recipient's mailer supports PGP/MIME, this is of course a way
better solution than any form of traditional inline PGP. All charsets
are then cleanly usable, without any hack or guesswork.


Bye!	Alain.
-- 
set honor_followup_to=yes in muttrc is the default value, and makes your
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