On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 06:33:53PM +0100, Hans Vanpee wrote: > After searching a bit further I think I solved my problem. Mutt retrieves > charset info from the locale, but it doesn't adapt the $send_charset variable > (it always defaults to us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8). I specified the correct > value in .muttrc and it seems to work fine now. > Is this a bug in mutt? > > +++ Hans Vanpee [28/12/09 15:02 +0100]: >> Hello, >> >> I am having a small problem with mutt: when composing a message it isn't >> always created with the right character set. My locale (on Ubuntu) is >> configured as nl_BE.UTF-8, so I would expect mutt to use the same charset >> when creating a message. Sometimes it uses US_ASCII. >> How can I setup mutt to use UTF-8 by default? >> I use vim for editing messages. >> >> My locale output: >> LANG=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LANGUAGE=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 >> LC_NUMERIC=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_TIME=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_COLLATE=C >> LC_MONETARY=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_MESSAGES=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_PAPER=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_NAME=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_ADDRESS=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_TELEPHONE=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_MEASUREMENT=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_IDENTIFICATION=nl_BE.UTF-8 >> LC_ALL=
Why should the message be sent in UTF-8 if it only contains ASCII characters? What additional value does that bring? The only difference is the encoding specified in the headers. If it only contains iso-8859-1 characters, why should it be sent in utf-8, which will result in more bytes and greater chance that a reader's MUA does not understand the encoding? Of course, UTF-8 is so widely supported now that the $send_charset magic is less useful than it once was.
