Re: lynx-dev mail with lynx

[Philip Webb]

990811 Klaus Weide replied to John Chang:
>> i use lynx to send mail sometimes (through the sendmail utility)
>> but i noticed that the received mail appears to have an attachment,
>> stating that some parts of the mail has non-ascii text.
>>> "---Executing: shownonascii
>>> This message contains non-ASCII text, which can only be displayed
>>> properly if you are running X11. What follows
>>> may be partially unreadable, but the English (ASCII) parts"
>> Is it possible to send regular text as plain text, not as mime attachments?
> This has nothing to do with MIME *attachments* -
> lynx never creates them (or other multipart MIME types).
> Lynx *does* send mail as plain text
> (or, when 'P'rinting HTML source, labelled as text/html).
> lynx can put the charset in the Content-type header.
> It may also generate a 'Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit' header.
> basically, there are two possibilities -
> (a) Lynx is sending the right 'charset'.  You have to teach
> your mail-reading program to handle the mail as you like.
 
i've noticed this & wondered why,
but this explains things, given a bit of experimentation.

i read mail with elm & things sent by Lynx get the irritating MIME warning,
which also interferes with ordinary scrolling of the display.
the problem is in  .elm/elmrc , which has a variable `displaycharset':
if that is set to `US-ASCII', elm presents Lynx's iso-8859-1 via MIME,
but if it's set to `iso-8859-1', elm displays it normally.
of course, having changed it to the latter,
i may find other messages will be misdisplayed,
but the problem is confirmed to be within elm.
Lynx is sending the correct headers:

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : address@hidden
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto