vm: vm is fooled by Windows encoding

[Manoj]

Package: vm
Version: 8.0.12
Severity: wishlist

It appears that one of the OS X email apps, and/or possibly other Windows
mailers, insist on adding a 'something-or-other-1252' encoding to messages.

When that happens, VM refuses to show me the message body. Editing the
message and manuall removing the encoding flag is all it takes. It is silly
that I have to do that by hand -- VM should simply be told to ignore said
encoding.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Set the variable vm-mime-default-face-charsets to whatever is appropriate to your system. I have it set to t, which means display all charsets.

[Mikko Huhtala (mhuhtala)]

> I have it set to t, which means display all charsets.

Is there some reason why this is not the default? You don't generally have to hunt around for encoding systems in other mail readers just to see your email.

[Ulrich Müller (ulm)]

Could you try if the patch attached to bug 453351 fixes this problem too?

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Mikko Huhtala writes:

> Is there some reason why this is not the default? You don't generally
> have to hunt around for encoding systems in other mail readers just to
> see your email.

Probably due to the age of VM. Emacs wasn't always capable of
displaying all the different character sets. Even now, Emacsen are
still evolving in this respect.

If you think it should be t by default, please raise it in the vm.info
newsgroup and let us see what the other users think.

Cheers,
Uday

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

We have discovered that setting vm-mime-default-face-charsets to t causes problems with "utf-8". So, this setting should not be used any more.

For western European users, '("us-ascii" "iso-8859-1" "windows-1252") seems to be an appropriate setting of this variable. For the other international users, we really don't know enough about their environments to give any advice.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Manoj, I have now verified that Emacs 22 and 23 handle Windows-1252 characters perfectly fine. There is no need to put 'windows-1252 in the vm-mime-default-face-charsets variable. In fact, putting it there inhibits the proper handling of the non-ascii characters in the Windows character set.

Our recommendation of setting the vm-mime-default-face-charsets is therefore only meant for XEmacs users.

Uday

[Manoj (srivasta)]

On Sat, Dec 05 2009, Uday Reddy wrote:

> Manoj, I have now verified that Emacs 22 and 23 handle Windows-1252
> characters perfectly fine. There is no need to put 'windows-1252 in the
> vm-mime-default-face-charsets variable. In fact, putting it there
> inhibits the proper handling of the non-ascii characters in the Windows
> character set.
>
> Our recommendation of setting the vm-mime-default-face-charsets is
> therefore only meant for XEmacs users.

        So for emacs23, one can just leave it nil? I can make it so
 that on Debian systems the default can be the list as on the mailing
 list, and for emacs23 the default could be nil, if that is the guidance
 we are getting.

        manoj
--
Ehrman's Commentary: (1) Things will get worse before they get
better. Who said things would get better?
Manoj Srivastava <email address hidden> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C

[Ulrich Müller (ulm)]

> So for emacs23, one can just leave it nil?

No, don't set it to nil, but leave it at its default. That is
'("us-ascii") under X and '("us-ascii" "iso-8859-1") else.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Hi Manoj, Which version of Emacs is distributed with Debian? (Not
FSF Emacs 22/23?)

Uday

[Manoj (srivasta)]

On Mon, Dec 07 2009, Uday Reddy wrote:

> Hi Manoj, Which version of Emacs is distributed with Debian? (Not
> FSF Emacs 22/23?)

        For our purposes, we need only be concerned with the non-stable
 versions of Debian, since vm is unlikely to be allowed through the
 stable gateway by the release managers. So, Debian unstable and
 testing have:
  emacs22
  emacs23
  xemacs21

        XEmacs has traditionally not been supported by the stand alone
 VM package, since the XEmacs folks (used to?) bunde in the VM package,
 and asked for XEmacs support to be dropped from the Debian package.

 Not in Debian proper but popular:
  emacs-snapshot

        manoj
--
There's another way to survive. Mutual trust -- and help. Kirk, "Day of
the Dove", stardate unknown
Manoj Srivastava <email address hidden> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Manoj writes:

> For our purposes, we need only be concerned with the non-stable
> versions of Debian, since vm is unlikely to be allowed through the
> stable gateway by the release managers. So, Debian unstable and
> testing have:
> emacs22
> emacs23
> xemacs21

I have verified that Emacs 22.2 and 23.1 have built-in support for
Windows-1252 and VM invokes it out of the box. No change of settings
needed. So the problem reported by the original poster shouldn't
arise. It must be that he/she is using some other version of Emacs.

In any case, the answer to his question "VM should simply be told to
ignore said encoding," is what we have given earlier. By putting
'windows-1252 in vm-mime-default-face-charsets, VM ignores the
encoding.

Cheers,
Uday