Re: Rmail-mbox branch

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Paul Michael Reilly writes:

 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > ... and as I pointed out to Stefan, for many users it would be
 > > very convenient and would cause no harm to transcode the headers too.
 > 
 > I could not chase down that message and I'm a little confused about
 > transcoding headers to the extent that I understand them to be ASCII
 > per rfc2822.

Stefan is correct: it will NOT be ASCII per RFC 2822; it will no
longer be proper mbox format.  Many tools (eg, most versions of
Python's email module) will immediately fatal error on it.  *But* it
would be useful to Rmail (which would need very little extra coding to
handle it, I believe) and to plain-text tools such as grep.

For users (Francesco seems to be one, and I bet Richard is, too) who
do not plan to use other MUAs, the extra convenience of this extension
to mbox format would be very useful.

Note that the reverse translation is trivial, too, since the functions
needed to MIME-encode the headers are easily available (probably
already in Rmail?, certainly in Gnus).