Re: smtpmail and ~/.authinfo

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 19:18:39 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote: 

>> From: Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>
>> Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:41:08 -0500
>> 
>> With raw-text they also get potentially unsafe characters, right?

EZ> They get what they put in the file.  If we assume that what's there is
EZ> acceptable by their SMTP server, it's "safe".

Exactly.  So the UTF-8 encoding won't change anything, it will only make
it easier for the netrc/authinfo file to be shared :)

>> Could you help me (or point me to the right examples) to:
>> 
>> - always create/write a file in UTF-8 on every platform

EZ> You mean, force Emacs to encode .authinfo in UTF-8 when creating it?
EZ> I guess that's the job for file-coding-system-alist.

So I would just override that when writing the netrc/authinfo file.  I
can't imagine any value in letting the user override the UTF-8 encoding,
can you?

>> - opportunistically open the file in binary, raw-text, UTF-8, etc. on
>> every platform

EZ> Sorry, I don't understand what you'd like to do.  Please elaborate,
EZ> and I will gladly try to help.

There must be netrc/authinfo files written in binary encoding because
that was the default.  I'd like to open them, but also open UTF-8
encoded netrc/authinfo files, and also accept raw-text or any other
reasonably guessed encoding.  For UTF-8 there are heuristics but Emacs
has them built-in, right?  So I don't have to write special code to
guess?

The alternative is to try as utf-8, then try binary, then give up.  But
that's less friendly to the user I think.

Ted