Re: Message/Mail Mode and UTF-8

[Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

On 4/15/2010 11:38 PM, Tim X wrote:
> Chris Yocum<cyocum@gmail.com>  writes:
>
>> While I have used emacs for a while as a text editor, etc.  I am now
>> using VM 8.1.0 in emacs to compose and send mail as well.  I noticed
>> that when I composed mail in either Message or Mail Mode that the MIME
>> attributes stated that I was sending a charset of us-ascii and I would
>> really like to send my mails with utf-8 set as the character set.
>> Does anyone know the magic incantation to get Mail/Message Mode to do
>> that?  I am using EMACS 23.1.1 on amd64 Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).
>> Thank you all very much in advance.
>>
>
> I'm not sure that is a good idea. From memory, the RFCs for mail specify
> messages should be 7 or possibly 8 bit. If you must use UTF-8, you
> probably have to set things up to send as MIME. Most mail servers will
> probalby handle UTF-8 fine, its the occasional one that doesn't which
> will cause things to go weird.

[This is funny.  I can see your response in gmane, but not Chris's original query.]

I think Chris just wants to use Unicode characters.  He wouldn't mind if the messages get MIME-encoded.

Chris, the VM variable to set is `vm-mime-8bit-composition-charset'.   See the VM manual section on "Sending Messages" -> "MIME composition".

By the way, VM uses mail-mode.  There is a plan to switch it to message-mode, but that won't happen for a while yet.

Cheers,
Uday