Re: FreeBSD 7.0 on DVD

> Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2008 21:31:22 +0100
> From: "Julian H. Stacey" <jhs_at_berklix.org>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org
> 
> Oliver Fromme wrote:
> > I think the problem is that your mail uses the charset
> > "KOI8-R", and Julian's MUA doesn't know how to handle
> > that.
> 
> EXMH 2.7.2 01.07.2005 (from 6.2-RELEASE) displays KOI8-R OK within
> itself, (Exmh is 2.7.2_1 in -current/ports).
> When clicking to reply & an xterm springs up running external
> selectable editor vi, then if base64, it's just a load of hex in
> vi.  If the KOI8-R is raw as in Dimitry's 2nd posting, my vi in
> xterm (with US default fonts) EXMH works OK, though his Russian sig
> line looks unintelligib;e, but probably would comes out unaltered
> on a russian xterm.
> 
> I guess an ideal MUA when clicking Reply might say eg 
>    "Which Enclosure[s] ? to edit"  & then sense base 64, decode it,
>    create an xterm(s) with matching font set(s), & start a [16 bit
>    char?] editor (maybe vi or eg cxterm if Chinese etc, & on
>    completion reverse all above for potentialy each enclosure ?  A
>    scarey/ambitious level of functionality to aspire to :-)
> 
> 
> > Maybe you should configure your mailer to send
> > plain ASCII when mailing to international (English-
> > sepaking) lists?
> 
> Would help, might be a nuisance for Dimitry & other switching per
> mail ?  Dimitry's 2nd koi8-r worked, (without MIME enclosure) no
> problem.  Just the base64 encoded MIME enclosure seemed to be the
> problem.  Might be easier/ better to leave that off ?
> 
> 
> > On the other hand, my client doesn't send plain ASCII
> > either, but ISO8859-1 (or -15, depending on the type of
> > terminal I'm sitting at).  I'm not aware of any problems
> > caused by that.
> > 
> > In fact KOI8-R is a superset of ASCII (just like the
> > ISO8859-* and Windows-1252 character sets).  So such
> > messages can be displayed as-is if they don't contain
> > characters beyond 7bit ASCII.  I think metamail is
> > clever enough to just do that.  At least it does that
> > for me; I had no problems displaying Bachilo Dmitry's
> > message, except for a few characters (cyrillic, I guess)
> > in the attribution line that were converted to question
> > marks.  Not a big deal.
> > 
> > I'm afraid I'm not familiar with EXMH, so I don't know
> > if this is helpful information.  Does EXMH call metamail
> > for MIME-formatted messages, or does it try handle them
> > itself?
> 
> Good question.  EXMH does use metamail at least for some things
> EXMH uses repl ( from ports/mail/nmh ) & ~/mail/replcomps &
> filter etc.  EXMH supports both an internal editor & external
> eg vi or whatever, Till now I've always used external vi.
> 
> 
> > BTW, I'm surprised that it simply seems to display the
> > raw base64 data.  If it doesn't know how to handle the
> > charset, it should either display the decoded data as-is,
> > or don't display it at all and give an error message.
> > I'm sure there's something that needs to be configured.
> 
> Yes, Thanks, got me thinking :-)
> I'd better look at base64 handling & ~/mail/ filter,replcomps,forwcomps.

Julian,

Did you get my suggestion for fixing this? Does it not work with sedit?
(Assuming you use sedit.) It works fine for me using Xemacs as my
editor.

In case my suggestion didn't make it, click "Preferences" and select
"Quoting", then turn off "Only symlink". That causes it to process both
base64 and quoted-printable properly in the included quoted text.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman_at_es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751