Hello Adrian, and thank you for this suggestion.
On Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 7:46:26 +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> In the third millenium, with virtually all software supporting UTF-8
> and most users using UTF-8 locales, it would be nice if this [default
> $send_charset] could be changed to "us-ascii:utf-8".
Some rare mailers do not support UTF-8. Some rare platforms do not
have well working UTF-8 locales, if at all. Many users prefer non-UTF-8
locales (for whatever reason). Changing $send_charset so would partly
defeat this Mutt nice feature to autoselect the best adapted minimal
necessary and sufficient charset. Feature compliant with the letter and
spirit of the relevant RFCs. Feature also compliant with the best
current practice. This change would reduce your mail's chances to be
correctly read everywhere. And it would send heavier mails. ;-)
So this default change is not a good idea, neither for Debian nor
upstream Mutt. IMHO it's not even a sensible custom ~/.muttrc setting
for yourself. I advice against it, but you do as you want of course.
> This would e.g. make the sent-mail folder containing only UTF-8 and
> not a mixture of two incompatible charsets.
Right, that would be an advantage, for treatment by grep, less, vim,
and such. However one can't expect a mail folder to be exactly the same
as a normal text file. Besides various charsets, it may contain QP,
base64, and encrypted texts. When I want to search a mail folder,
I usually choose Mutt <search> tool, in $thorough_search=yes mode: It
does decode/decrypt/transcode/whatever, and matches against the
resulting clear text. The grep command can be used against a mail
folder, but it is expected to miss some occurences anyway.
Having an UTF-8 only sent-mail folder would still perhaps be an
advantage, but IMHO this can in no way justify breaking the
$send_charset feature.
Bye! Alain.
--
« Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send. »
Jon Postel / Robustness Principle / RFC 1122
