* Derek Martin on Wednesday, July 04, 2007 at 15:08:47 -0400: > If you've ever taken a computer science class at a school
Never. I went to school when there weren't any computers around; thank God those days (I mean school days) are long gone ... I'm blissfully uneducated re technical stuff (I got into non-graphical interfaces for *aesthetical* reasons -- a bit like Bauhaus: form and function: better functionality -> more beauty). >> I wasn't accusing Mutt. > > I know you're not, but you have it stuck in your head let's hope it is not an axe > that Mutt can do something about a bug in a library, and that's > just not possible. > [Note: I'm relying on the analysis of others being correct that this > is a bug in iconv, I have not attempted to verify this myself. > Assuming that's correct, it is not possible in any practical way for > mutt to work around.] I was merely (and stubbornly) suggesting to reevaluate this assumption, because the way it is ... >>> and the solution is to update your libiconv to one that's not >>> broken. >> >> Unfortunately there's nothing that tells an unexperienced user >> that it is iconv's fault. > > That's why we have mutt-users and mutt-dev. :) ... chances are high that folks who are less stubborn than me -- expierence tells me that this is a very high percentage of the population ;) -- /would/ accuse my beloved Mutt. In the case of the OP the charset-hooks I suggested (courtesy of Alain Bench) actually helped, sometimes a message-hook would. And of course the best thing is to upgrade iconv. But imagine yourself in the situation of urgently trying to access a mailbox with your favorite client and you just can't, and you are left in the dark about the causes why this happens. Then, already a certain level of stubbornness is needed, you open the huge mailbox with your editor, or start grepping a Maildir, but what are you looking for? How can you isolate the broken message, while not being sure that it's the fault of a single message, the OP just was to a certain extent, because amavis gave him a warning. Then, more stubbornness, you fire up a non-unicode environment, and lo and behold, you can open the mailbox, and then by trial and error, check by moving messages out of the last 100 to a temporary mailbox (you don't want to lose correspondence) and retrying to open the mailbox in unicode environment, CTRL-Z ... That's why still believe that this is worth looking into, because otherwise an enormous FAQ would be needed, which might be even harder to do ;) c -- Intelligence is like a four-wheel drive vehicle: It allows you to get stuck in much more remote places.
