[VM] Any reason to not use utf-8?

Julian Bradfield

2014-09-14 09:39:29 UTC

Post by Yeechang Lee
to .vm, but found during testing that a message containing
áéíóúñ
was labeled by VM as iso-8859-1 and mangled on display in Gmail (but
displayed correctly upon receipt in VM, because I have
; First, don't display iso-8859-1 as-is in default face
(delete "iso-8859-1" vm-mime-default-face-charsets)
; Then substitute windows-1252 for iso-8859-1
(add-to-list 'vm-mime-mule-charset-to-coding-alist '("iso-8859-1" utf-8))
(add-to-list 'vm-mime-mule-charset-to-coding-alist '("us-ascii" utf-8))

The penultimate line above says "when you have determined that a
message should be in the iso-8859-1 charset, use the utf-8 coding to
send it out. This can never be a right thing to do! (And has nothing
to do with windows-1252). Thus your message was labelled iso-8859-1,
but actually utf-8, so no wonder Gmail was confused. You could read it
in VM, because your mistake reverses itself "when a message says it's
iso-8859-1, read it in utf-8".

Post by Yeechang Lee
in .vm). I changed the setting to
(setq vm-coding-system-priorities '(utf-8))
and the next message--labeled as utf-8--displayed correctly in
Gmail.
Is there any reason to *not* use utf-8 as my one and only outgoing
message-coding system?

Not really. I still prefer the legacy coding systems, because a lot of
Europeans still use iso-8859-1, and many Chinese still use Big5 or
GBK. But everybody should be able to cope with utf-8 nowadays.