[TriLUG] strange chars/formatting in received e-mail

[Alexey Toptygin]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011, Jym Williams Zavada wrote:

> I use the same client, and see a similar problem on occasion.  I most often 
> use alpine on Mac OS X in the Terminal.app, but I also use alpine on Linux. I 
> don't recall ever seeing the problem on the latter, and on the former it's 
> only been a bother when I've tried to print out the messages.  I've always 
> assumed it's some sort of mismatch regarding character set interpretation, 
> and I figured eventually I'd get both alpine's and Terminal.app's settings to 
> coincide.  Even though I don't find it annoying, I too am curious to find out 
> what others have to say about this.

I don't know about alpine, but the last release of pine has a bug that 
completely breaks non-ASCII characters in UTF-8 encoded mail (I know my 
terminal settings are correct because e.g. less can correctly display 
UTF-8 text on my terminal). It can't even export the message correctly.

Having looked at the pine code base, I am starting to think that any 
further development based on it is a mistake - there are some real Cthonic 
horrors in there. I love the pine interface, so I'm sticking with it for 
now, but I think the time is ripe for someone to write a work-alike 
implementation from scratch.

 			Alexey