Re: Rmail-mbox branch

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > Sadly [saving the decoded version] cannot be done for headers,

Not if you wish to maintain portability to strictly conforming MUAs.
It could be a user option, though.  I suspect that many MUAs (eg mutt)
can be taught to do something graceful with high-bit-set characters in
the headers (like, "cat them to the terminal" ;-).

If interoperability with grep is more important than interoperability
with Outhouse Excess, why not let the user do it?

Also, it would be mildly tedious but certainly easy enough to let your
favorite MUA (eg, Gnus, or nmh from the command line) give you a
summary list from the (undecoded) headers, grep that, and then grep
the bodies.

Don't get me wrong.  Interoperability with other MUAs is extremely
important.  To be taken seriously as a well-behaved MUA, IMO Rmail TNG
*must* be capable of saving messages in MIME form (which is trivially
possible for well-formed messages off the wire, just leave the mbox
alone) and decode them on every presentation.  But if some user
doesn't care about RFC conformance, we need not strangle her with it!