On 9 Feb 2012, at 16:31, Bill Cole wrote: > On 9 Feb 2012, at 3:11, Benny Kj?r Nielsen wrote: > >> On 9 Feb 2012, at 8:19, Alan Schmitt wrote: >> >>> I interact with a computer program by email (a Diplomacy judge to be >>> precise) that mangles text with accents. It seems it's because I >>> send the messages as utf 8 but it interprets and forwards them as >>> ISO-8859-1. Is there a way to tell MailMate to send a particular >>> message in a different encoding? >> >> No. I was also hoping such problems were an issue of the past. > > That's a refreshing bit of optimism, but sadly it does not yet reflect > the real world. Despite a wealth of obviously right ways to do things > like picking a message charset and encoding, legacy code and sclerotic > wetware persist in perverse bugginess.
Given the number of workarounds in MailMate already I'll probably soon lose any sense of optimism :-) >> Anyone else on the list with similar problems? > > Yes and no. I have not encountered this yet with MM because I had a > very slow transition from TBird, but there is a small subset of my > *human* correspondents whose mail clients know nothing of utf-8 and > who instead use either some Windows 'code page' (CP1252 being one, aka > 'almost Latin-1', but I've also had need to use Indian and Chinese > encodings ) or can only handle pure ASCII as the Elder Gods intended. > This only forces me into a specific encoding randomly a few times per > year but when I need a non-utf-8 encoding, I REALLY need it. It would > probably be adequate for my needs to have a mode to > force/squish/transliterate a message into ASCII since even when I am > mailing someone who prefers Hindi or Cantonese, I am always only > writing US English. (I am cultural imperialism in action!) Since ascii is a subset of utf-8 then it may be ?good enough? in many cases even if the recipient client does not support utf-8. Unless of course it refuses to display the content. Just to be clear, a message which only contains ascii has no charset in its Content-Type, so that should always work. And also, please don't get me wrong. I do not oppose some kind of charset feature (as long as the default is utf-8), but it is not (yet) a high priority. -- Benny
