[SOLVED] can mailx show UTF-8 charsets?

mfoley · 01-03-2022, 11:50 AM

I am using mailx as my email client (yes, I know ...). My Konsole session is set to use en_US.UTF-8, and the 'locale' command verifies that is being used -- and I can view, using cat, files containing UTF-8 characters.

I have tried with and without 'set ttycharset=UTF-8' in my .mailrc file. No matter what I try, when I read a message in mailx having a UTF-8 character, I get "[binary content]" as my message body.

Is it possible or not to read messages with mailx having UFT-8 characters?

shruggy · 01-03-2022, 12:19 PM

I guess it depends on what mailx implementation is used. S-Nail should be able to understand UTF-8. Try it in lowercase

Code:

set ttycharset=utf-8

mfoley · 01-04-2022, 09:27 AM

Believe it or not, just changing "ttycharset=UTF-8" to lower case worked! Sheesh! The mailx man page says, "Best results are usually achieved when mailx is run in a UTF-8 locale on a UTF-8 capable terminal." Notice, NOT in lower case. The man page further reads,

Quote:

ttycharset
The character set of the terminal mailx operates on. There is normally no need to set this variable since mailx can determine
this automatically by looking at the LC_CTYPE locale setting; if this succeeds, the value is assigned at startup and will be
displayed by the set command. Note that this is not necessarily a character set name that can be used in Internet messages.

It apparently DOES NOT look at LC_CTYPE, as advertised! Furthermore, no mention that the ttycharset needs to be in lower case. You would think after all these centuries mailx would be pretty bug-free by now.

Thanks for this solution.