Subject: what is "charset=X-UNKNOWN"

From: daniel lance herrick <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 16:00:56 -0500 (EST)

Using pine 4.21 on Solaris,

I replied to a message in the amaya mailing list.

After some character responded privately with the
suggestion that I use something other than pine, I
found the header

Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=X-UNKNOWN

in the headers of the copy of the message in my
sent-mail box.

I deleted the message I was replying to, but the 
"SoAndSo Wrote:" notation added to the quoted part
by pine contains the string "[iso-8859-1]".

The attachment is an entire mailbox containing only 
the copy of my outgoing message from sent-mail.

Is this X-UNKNOWN considered a feature?

dan

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From: Mats Dufberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 23:28:46 +0100 (CET)

> the copy of my outgoing message from sent-mail.

You responeded to an email encoded in the ISO 8859-1 character set. I
guess that you have not set neither pine nor your shell to use that
character set. That means that the character set is unknown. Furthermore,
I guess that your character set is US-ASCII.

You respond to the email and therefore include 8 bit codes. Those code are
undefined under ASCII, which means that there is no character. Pines there
concludes it cannot be ASCII, but it doesn't know what it is.

The senders name contained an ISO 8859-1 character, and when that was
quoted, the explicit character set was kept to indicated what it was
suppossed to be.

Mats

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Mats Dufberg                                 [email-masked]
Blåarvsgränd 42                                    +46-8-38 48 59
SE-162 45 Vällingby, Sweden                       +46-70-258 2588

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From: daniel lance herrick <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 17:44:42 -0500 (EST)

Ok. I don't think X-UNKNOWN was the right
response, but that may still be my ignorance.

Is there configuration somewhere that I could
use to indicate that I have things set up to
display correctly more than one (but not all) of
the 8859 family of character sets?

(X on Solaris here, X on Linux at home)

Three of the 'a's in your address display with
diacritical marks over them, one different from
the others, so pico on this xterm knows how to
display some characters that are not part of
US-ASCII. (This Solaris environment was set up for
me, I don't know what the details are, and haven't
done the work yet to find out where to look.)

dan

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From: Mats Dufberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 00:11:39 +0100 (CET)

> the 8859 family of character sets?

I don't know... In principle it should be possible. It would be simpler if
we converted to Unicode, and used UTF-8 as the encoding scheme...

> done the work yet to find out where to look.)

Yes, but you don't know if the display is correct. :-)

They probably are in this case, but you can only trust characters from the
character set that you system directly supports.

Mats