Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2012-01-19, Uday Reddy <address@hidden> wrote:
> More generally, I am thinking that there is no reason why we can't have VM
> folders stored in some other character set, other than US-ASCII, e.g.,
> UTF-8.  Those folders won't be interoperable with other mail clients, but do
...
> careful reengineering effort.  The assumption about 7-bit US-ASCII is
> probably pervasive in a lot of VM code.  So, it will need extensive testing,

I have no idea what you're talking about! VM makes no assumptions at
all about the character set of its folders, except that that message
headers are (as required) in ASCII - many of my patches over
the last few years have been removing the accidental cases where it
failed to enforce its agnosticism.

VM folders are simply binary files. The character set of a given
message - or subpart of a message - is determined by its MIME charset.

If you wanted, you could transcode all non-utf-8 parts to utf-8, but
the folder would still be a binary file; it would just be a binary
file that happened also to be valid utf-8 as a whole.