Re: Customizing coding priority

[Sven Bretfeld <sven.bretfeld@relwi.unibe.ch>]

 
>> The last line outside the citation just containes three German umlauts
>> (I use this example for testing). The broken characters in the
>> citation are umlauts too. The headers of these replies say text/plain;
>> iso-2022-jp was the Content-type. I've tried C-x RET iso-8859-15 as
>> well as Peter's suggestion M-x prefer-coding-system iso-8859-15. But
>> the problem is still exactly the same. What else can it be?

> How did you insert those umlauts, exactly? And what does Emacs
> display if you go to one of those characters and type "C-u C-x ="?

I've already tried this today. It's quite interesting. The umlauts in
the quotations are displayed in a font different from the rest
(somewhat smaller and bolder). They are said to be part of the
iso-8859-15 charset when I type C-u C-x = (just as expected). All
other characters are plain (ASCII (ISO646 IRV)). When I add my own
text after the quotation all umlauts I type belong to
latin-iso8859-1. When I send this text it is destructed again. Then I
found out that, if I yank umlauts from the quotation to my own text
(instead of typing them myself), the sent message stays intact and is
displayed fine after receiving it again, albeit the Content-type
header says "charset unknown".

To my understanding this means that Emacs is unable to translate
umlauts belonging to iso-8859-15 to the default charset I use for
umlauts when writing replies, i.e. iso-8859-1. Therefore the umlauts
in quotations are kept untranslated in the coding system of the
original sender, i.e. iso-8859-15. This mixture of iso-8859-15 in
quotations and iso-8859-1 in my part seems to disturb Emacs so that it
encodes the entire umlauts of my reply as iso-2022-jp when sending it.

So I've tried to avoid iso-8859-1 completely in replies and use
umlauts belonging to iso-8859-15 also for my own part of the text. But
this doesn't work for any reason. I've tried to change the coding
system and the input method of the reply buffer manually to
iso-8859-15 (using C-x f RET and C-x RET C-\) but umlauts I type
always come as iso-8859-1.

By the way, I also tried to start Emacs with an almost empty .emacs
file. The problem stays. So it seems not to depend on any user
specific configuration.

It's really strange. Can it be a simple bug in vm? But it seems to
work for other people.

Thanks for your help

Sven

(Sorry that I have destroyed the threading. I received Eli's last
message on another account while experimenting with my problem. I
forgot the keep option in fetchmailrc and had to copy and paste the
message.)