tlug: RMAIL mangles messages

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Stuart" == Stuart Luppescu <s-luppescu@example.com> writes:

    Stuart> I'm trying to use RMAIL in emacs 20.3 for my Japanese mail,

Very bad idea; RMail is obsolete and not maintained by anybody who
knows anything about internationalization.  Switch to VM.  YMMV; VM's
author most vehemently does not support Emacs 20, but it seems to work
for most people.  See the gnu.vm.info FAQ for how to get around "We
don't support GNU Emacs 20" errors if they occur.  You could switch to
XEmacs, which is supported by VM and has other benefits.

Or Gnus.  Gnus is very good for processing mail and news in a single
interface, and for handling large numbers of messages.  But it's got a 
very shallow learning curve, while VM has (in XEmacs only) a nice
toolbar and other goodies for people without time and inclination to
learn a complex powerful user interface and customization system.

    Stuart> and my /var/spool/mail file is wiped out as well. Can
    Stuart> anyone tell me what's going on, and how I can keep from
    Stuart> losing all my mail again? Thanks.

Yeah, you've got EUC in your .sig.  Evil: unless there's out of band
information (eg, a MIME header), non-ASCII files should be in ISO-2022
and use escape sequences to designate _all_ non-ASCII character sets.
First thing you should do is

C-x C-f ~/.signature
C-x C-m f iso-2022-jp
C-x C-s

If you save your own messages in that file, then I bet Mule sees that
EUC and proceeds to assume the whole file is ISO-8859-1 (probably,
depends on how your environment is set; maybe it thinks its looking at
EUC-JP if you're in the Japanese environment; what does your own sig
look like in messages?

You haven't lost any mail (I hope, I don't trust Mule + RMail in this
situation; VM reads all folders as binary, and creates a separate
buffer to handle non-ISO-8859-1 character sets, but RMail lets Mule
guess the charset, which _can_ lead to loss of data, although normally
it won't).  Kill the RMail buffer and re-read it with

C-u C-x C-f ~/RMAIL iso-2022-jp

and you should be able to read your mail.

You should also be able to put

(setq file-coding-alist (cons '("RMAIL" . iso-2022-jp) file-coding-alist))

in your ~/.emacs and the next time you start RMAIL you'll be OK.
Maybe.  As long as none of your correspondents send you raw SJIS or
EUC (ie, not in MIME format).

-- 
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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