From: Bill Mills-Curran <bill@mills-curran.net>
I'm having troubles retaining special (8 bit?) encoding in email messages from the MS Exchange server where I work. Here's the normal path of my data:
MS Exchange -> MS(?) IMAP -> fetchmail -> linux sendmail -> procmail -> mutt
By the time an email with color fonts gets to mutt, the color is gone. As a test, I modified my .fetchmailrc to specify "cat" as my MDA so eliminated sendmail, procmail and mutt as offenders.
I've also added "pass8bits" to my .fetchmailrc -- no improvement.
Thus, I've narrowed the suspects to MS IMAP and fetchmail.
Does anyone have experience with this problem?
Well, I use Emacs to read mail. All my mail is green on black, with some yellow headers. I like it that way and there is nothing MS Exchange or anybody else can do about it. You don't say how you made colored fonts in the first place. If you are using HTML to specify fonts then I don't see how the loss of them can have anything to do with 8-bit encoding, because HTML is just Ascii with extra structure. Could you be sending MIME Content-Type: multipart/alternative, with Mutt set to read the Ascii alternative? If you are trying to send DOS screen colors in the high order bytes---I don't know what to say---you aren't doing that right? I didn't understand what you meant by using 'cat' as a MDA. Unix 'cat' copies a file. Do you mean you copied a file from your local disk into fetchmail thus bypassing IMAP but using Mutt, or do you mean you copied incoming mail directly to the screen, thus bypassing Mutt but using IMAP? Or am I out in the weeds? -- Keith