Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Uday Reddy]

Julian Bradfield writes:

> On 2012-01-19, Uday Reddy <address@hidden> wrote:
> > More generally, I am thinking that there is no reason why we can't have VM
> > folders stored in some other character set, other than US-ASCII, e.g.,
> > UTF-8.  Those folders won't be interoperable with other mail clients, but do
> 
> VM folders are simply binary files. The character set of a given
> message - or subpart of a message - is determined by its MIME charset.
> 
> If you wanted, you could transcode all non-utf-8 parts to utf-8, but
> the folder would still be a binary file; it would just be a binary
> file that happened also to be valid utf-8 as a whole.

Oh, perhaps you are saying they are "binary" as opposed to "ASCII".  I think
that is a matter of view point.

You can load a utf-8 folder into VM but, if there are any multibyte codes in
there, they will get interpreted as separate characters.  You can't search
them.  If it has 8-bit codes, you might be in sligtly better luck.  But if
your default is iso-8859-1, and your message text is in iso-8858-X, then you
won't be able to search it either.

You are probably thinking of the folder as being made up of bytes as opposed
to characters.  That is a fine view point to take as long as you don't care
to search.  But searching is what this thread is about!

Cheers,
Uday