How to send with charset=iso-8859-1 instead of unknown-8bit?

mutt at raf.org mutt at raf.org
Wed Jun 20 02:16:12 UTC 2018


Hi,

I have some software that invokes mutt (non-interactively) to
send email with iso-8859-1 body text.

I've noticed that emails with accented characters are being sent
with charset=unknown-utf8 instead of charset=iso-8859-1.

The muttrc manpage says that the default value for send_charset
is "us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8" and that, "In case the text
cannot be converted into one of these exactly, mutt uses
$charset as a fallback". The default charset value is utf-8 (but
the body text is not being entered via the terminal). There is
no mention of unknown-8bit.

I don't understand what conversion is referred to here. I would
have thought (incorrectly, no doubt) that mutt would use the
first character set in send_charset that could be the character
set of the body (i.e. just detection, not conversion).

But if that were the case, the default send_charset would almost
always result in us-ascii or iso-8859-1 being used since most 8
bit characters are valid iso-8859-1. If my understanding were
right, it would make more sense for the default send_charset to
be "us-ascii:utf-8:iso-8859-1" (or "us-ascii:utf-8:unknown-8bit").

So I'm clearly not understanding how it works. But I'm only
thinking this way because that's how vim works with its
fileencodings variable.

What am I not understanding? And how do I make mutt set the
charset of outgoing mail to iso-8859-1 when it detects accented
(iso-8859-1) characters?

Thanks,
raf



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