Re: Re: OSX Mail app → Emacs ?

[Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com>]

Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com> writes:

>> On 2017/06/03, at 17:38, Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I would recommend a backend which stores mails
>>> single files (one file per mail), e.g. nnml.
>>> That way you can use the shell tools on the
>>> mails much easier than those
>>> many-mails-in-one-file methods.
>> 
>> This is an overpromise. It *may* make using shell tools easier *if*
>> your mail is all in English, and even more so if it’s all plain text.
>
> Which is absolutely not the case. I have both plain text and html, all
> in 3 different languages that use different character sets.

Usually, an email contains a header that describes how it's encoded.

An email client that uses mbox will copy the email and header into the
mbox file.  Then when the email is viewed it can look at the header and
select the correct coding system.

That's how Rmail works, and I think it's how GNUS works too.  So, if the
mbox files contain this information they will be usable despite the fact
that several different languages and character sets are in use.

I'm not sure though if older emails follow these conventions.  If they
don't then there may be problems.  In that case some reprocessing may be required.

As other have said, you can search many mbox files using Mairix.  Or,
you can search one at a time using the search feature of the mail
client.  I do the latter, since I usually have a good idea which mbox
file to look in.

BR,
Robert Thorpe