non-ascii email forwarding failures

[Antoine Beaupré]

On 2019-02-25 18:15:21, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Mon 2019-02-25 18:01:55 -0500, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
>> I seem to have forgotten to CC the list in my reply, sorry for the
>> noise.
>>
>> I elided the attachment here because I sent a newer version in
>> 87r2bvjx02.fsf at curie.anarc.at.
>
> thanks!
>
>> On 2019-02-25 17:11:26, Antoine Beaupr wrote:
>
> Interesting, your MUA is relying on the default charset=iso-8859-1
> (latin-1) or is it charset=iso-8859-15 (latin-7)?
>
> it's sending me octal 0o351 as the last letter of your last name, which
> my notmuch-emacs renders as a raw octet ("Beaupr\351"), maybe because
> i'm in a UTF-8 locale?
>
> wtf, why are we still failing at this in 2019, with updated MUAs?  i
> guess it might be my own fault for having this line in my
> custom-set-variables in ~/.emacs:
>
> '(message-default-charset (quote utf-8))
>
> but the docs for message-default-charset say:
>
>   This variable is obsolete since 26.1;
>   The default charset comes from the language environment
>
> shouldn't emacs mml mode explicitly mark the charset in the Content-Type
> header when generating a text/plain part no matter what?

So I have no idea what's going on with mail forwards, but this is the
kind of stuff that happens to me all the time and I can't describe
correctly enough to file a bug.

The gist of it is that, under some weird circumstances, notmuch-emacs
(message-mode.el?) will screw up email forwards in a big time. I just
forwarded (or did I just reply? not sure) that private email to the list
to trigger that bug...

I get that from time to time. I think the key is that it's an email I
*sent* not *received*, which are somewhat different in their storage
mechanism...

The first symptom will be that, when sending, I'd get a prompt like
this:

Non-printable characters found.  Continue sending? (delete, replace, send, edit, ?): 

I never know what to answer to that, i usually just hit "send" or
"PLOKTA". Then I get two more annoying prompts, just to make sure I
really know about the bug. It also reminds me of how I speak a weird
language with weird characters and I don't belong on the american
Internet (capital I):

Message contains characters with unknown encoding.  Really send? (y or n) y
Use ASCII as charset? (y or n) y

ASSCII indeed. Anyways, what you saw is the result of that *amazing*
user experience.

I wish I knew how to fix that or make that more useful to folks who have
more of a clue than me. ;)

(and sorry for the cussin'...)

A.

-- 
Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces,
without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity.
                        - Ernesto "Che" Guevara