Re: mhfixmsg: possible bugette, -textcharset/-replacetextplain questions

[David Levine]

Conrad writes:

> A few questions re: mhfixmsg (nmh 1.7.1-4 on Debian)..
>
>   - I'm contemplating running the above command on my entire email
>     archive; is there any reason not to use "-textcharset utf-8" on
>     everything?  Seems to me like an eminently sensible thing to do

Yes, and that's one of the examples in the mhfixmsg(1) documentation.
It's not the default because its use requires that nmh be built with
iconv(3).

>   - Similarly I was wondering about adding -replacetextplain to all
>     conversions, but I'm kindof thinking that that's not so smart, nor
>     so useful — since simply running mhfixmsg will render stuff usefully
>     grep'able, the UTF-8 conversion will make the files more reliably
>     readable, and 'show' will prefer HTML parts anyway so the
>     replacetextplain doesn't really give me anything useful.  Is that
>     right?

Yes.  The motivating use case is messages that contain an empty
text/plain part.  To save Ralph the trouble of replying that the
sender should be notified so that they can fix their messages, I've
been trying for over 6 years now.

>   - The attached message contains some Windows-1252 parts, yet when I
>     try to "mhfixmsg -textcharset utf-8 -verbose" on it, I get the
>     following:
>
>       mhfixmsg: 1 part 1.2, decode text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
>       mhfixmsg: 1 part 1.1, decode text/html; charset="Windows-1252"
>       mhfixmsg: 1 part 1.2, convert utf-8 to utf-8
>       mhfixmsg: 1 part 2, convert utf-8 to utf-8
>
>     .. "convert utf-8 to utf-8" looks like a reporting bug, no?

Right, fixed, thanks!

David