Hi,

I have this in my .pinerc:

| posting-character-set=UTF-8

However, when sending an eMail that only contains ASCII characters,
alpine sends the message with these headers instead:

[…]
| User-Agent: Alpine 2.11 (DEB 23 2013-08-11)
| MIME-Version: 1.0
| Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

This may be correct, but the message body, in this case, is the
result of piping through “gpg -seatr r.ecipi@ent.addre.ss” which
means it’s an ASCII-armoured PGPv4 message. Other PGP-capable
MUAs (wrongly) use the MIME content-type even for Inline PGP
messages, and thus display the result badly. PGP itself does
not indicate an encoding if it’s UTF-8 (only for nōn-default
things like latin9), but even if I indicate an encoding in the
PGP pseudo-header, it’s not used.

Please fix alpine to honour the posting-character-set instead
of downgrading to ASCII, possibly with a new option (since I
can understand wanting to have the downgrade case if one is
communicating with ancient nōn-Unicode-capable systems).

Thanks!

Thorsten,

The behavior that Alpine exhibits is documented in the help for the
option, so the subject is not quite correct, because this is intended
behavior (see x-alpine-help:h_config_post_char_set)

In regards to adding another configuration option. I see why you would
like to do this, but I find this to create confusion and of very limited
value (it "helps" in only one case). There are reasons why you want to tag
the message with the us-ascii charset and not UTF-8: you want the message
to be readable by every program.

The real problem is that the content of the message is encoded text, so
while the encoded text is US-ASCII, the decoded text is not. Given that
the character encoding refers to the transmitted text, I do not see what
else can be done here. The problem is in the fact that you assume that an
e-mail program should arbitrarily change the character set from one to
another for correct display. This type of issues are better dealt with
attachments, that is what Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Type are
for in attachments.

I do not know if you have tried to pipe the message to an appropriate
viewer (maybe cat? or iconv?) to see if that helps you read these
messages, but that is what I would try in this case.