When emerge mutt 1.5.8-r1 either with cjk or -cjk, mutt cannot display/send a mail correctly. The problem is mail.yahoo.com always send mail with us-ascii charset no matter what I type. That results in a chinese mail tagged with us-ascii charset. I understand it's not mutt's bug nor gentoo ebuild. But is it possible to disable iconv in mutt at all to prevent this kind of issue? Like to add a USE flag "-iconv" to append a --disable-iconv configuration flag when configuring mutt? It prevents people using chinese mail to use mutt. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. mail from mail.yahoo.com, with some chinese characters in the mail body 2. open the mail in mutt 3. all chinese characters become '?' Actual Results: mail body as follow ==================== ???? from yahoo Expected Results: mail body expected ==================== 中文 from yahoo mutt USE flag +cjk +crypt -debug +imap -mbox +nls -nntp +sasl -slang +ssl -vanilla LC_CTYPE="zh_TW" or LC_CTYPE=
I patched mutt ebuild manually with --disable-iconv but it ends up with some other problem. mutt always says the To: field is not a valid IDN no matter what it is. Anyone can help? yours, Dennis
Hello Dennis. Report the problem to Yahoo, and workaround it in Mutt with: | charset-hook ^us-ascii$ big5
Thanks for the help. After adding the line into .muttrc, I could read chinese characters from yahoo. But it still has problem from mutt to mutt. The chinese characters are translated to something like utf-8 when sending. When receiving, mutt interpretes the content as big5 and hence not readable. The problem is, there are still lots of charset-unawared mail client. When mail sent by mutt is translated into another encoding, it results in not readable. And yes, I know that's the defect of those mail client. But I think the ability to read mail from defect mail client should be also a feature, doesn't it?
> problem from mutt to mutt. The chinese characters are translated to > something like utf-8 when sending. When receiving, mutt interpretes > the content as big5 and hence not readable. Configure your editor to save in current locale charset. Drop the --disable-iconv option you experimented. Set a suitable $send_charset, as perhaps: | set send_charset="us-ascii:iso-8859-1:iso-8859-15:windows-1252:big5:utf-8" Mutt should now be able to send Chinese mails in big5 charset, English mails in US-Ascii, and so on. > I think the ability to read mail from defect mail client should be > also a feature, doesn't it? Sure: Setup Mutt to read at best broken mails is fine, unless this breaks valid mails.
> is it possible to disable iconv in mutt at all to prevent this kind of > issue? Like to add a USE flag "-iconv" to append a --disable-iconv > configuration flag when configuring mutt? To be clear: No. Disabling iconv at buildtime would create a whole lot of other issues. It is not a sensible option for a distribution package, nor even for yourself. Mutt has a bunch of runtime settings to tune charset conversions, even for some broken mail cases. User groups like comp.mail.mutt or the mutt-users mailing list may help you use these settings cleanly. Chinese people can happily use Mutt mostly without problems, even interoperating with "charset-unawared mail client". This bug should be closed, Dennis.
Alain's right, closing
