Re: [nail-devel] Unencoded non-English letters in From

[Björn P. <bj...@xn...>]

Steffen Daode Nurpmeso wrote:
> But i would suggest the following to you:
> 
> - Put the following line in your ~/.mailrc so you can use
>   a standard mailx(1) side-by-side with nail(1)
> 
>     set SNAIL_EXTRA_RC=~/.nailrc
> 
> - And the following lines in your ~/.nailrc:
> 
>     set sendcharsets=utf-8,iso-8859-1
>     # Plus, maybe:
>     #set sendcharset=
>     #set ttycharset=

That causes Nail to prefer UTF-8 over Latin-1, but it doesn't help with 
my problem.

>   (It seems the »Wärst du doch in Düsseldorf geblieben« from the
>   console is in fact interpreted as LATIN1.)

Input from the console is in UTF-8. Nail converts it from UTF-8 to 
Latin-1 (when I don't set sendcharsets as above) and then encodes it in 
the "Q" encoding.


To find out what the message looks like when it passes from Nail to 
Sendmail I replaced the sendmail executable with this:

#!/bin/bash
tee >(actual-sendmail "$@")

It turns out that Nail includes a From field only when I set the sender 
address with -r, and then it does encode it correctly:

$ echo blah | mail -s Düsseldorf nobody
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2012 23:16:35 +0200
To: nobody
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?D=FCsseldorf?=
User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.5 7/5/10
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

blah

$ echo blah | mail -s Düsseldorf -r 'Björn <bj...@xn...>' nobody
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2012 23:17:52 +0200
From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rn?= <bj...@xn...>
To: nobody
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?D=FCsseldorf?=
Message-ID: <5054f080.e6CPH9D4AMIs+nrj%bj...@xn...>
User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.5 7/5/10
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

blah

Apparently it's Sendmail that composes the From field when I don't use -r, 
and fails to check for non-English letters. On the other hand, using -r 
causes Sendmail to add an "X-Authentication-Warning" field, which it also 
doesn't encode, so the message can become invalid anyway. Interestingly, 
Postfix's implementation of the "sendmail" command has the same problem 
with From. At least Postfix doesn't use X-Authentication-Warning.

If implementations of "sendmail" can't be trusted to compose valid From 
fields, then perhaps it could be a good idea for Nail to always include 
this field? And when Nail passes -r to Sendmail, perhaps it should provide 
only the email address to avoid non-English letters in X-Authentication-
Warning?

Anyway, it looks like I should take this issue to the developers of 
Sendmail and Postfix. Thanks for showing me -d. Seeing the Sendmail 
arguments helped me figure out what was going on.

Björn Persson