On Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:51:47 +0000, Mark Walters wrote: > > Presumably something is converting it from 8bit to base64 along the > > path. > > If it makes a difference my setup is gmail->offlineimap->notmuch Mine is the same for the relevant messages. > > I scouted around for other messages that include © (which is what I > > presume causes the encoding), but the ones I have are all still 8bit. > > A different example which shows the same problem (for me) is > id:"m2fwg1uapw.fsf@gmail.com" This one is encoded as quoted-printable. I agree that the output of | cat >/tmp/file in the emacs UI produces the encoded file and that it is identical to the file on disk. Hence, I can reproduce the problem you reported :-) (Maybe amusingly) the printing stuff that you originally mentioned included some code to produce a 'text' version of a message for printing. Maybe that could also be used to implement a simple `notmuch-show-save-message' command?