Re: [tlug] can't view iso-2022 in mutt

[Andrew Hamilton <awh@example.com>]

On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 10:12:43PM -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
> My question is where would I begin looking for this?  Is it an mlterm
> issue, a lack in fluxbox (unlikely, as I can see it in sylpheed) or
> FreeBSD.  There is no ISO-2022 locale option--locale -a | grep ja_JP
> just gives me euc, utf-8 and SJIS.  

It's actually a Mutt issue.

The traditional way of sending Japanese email is for the MUA to 
transcode from the system encoding to ISO-2022-JP when sending 
mails to the server, and then from ISO-2022-JP to the system
encoding when displaying messages.

The system encoding is almost never ISO-2022-JP (can't think of many 
terminals that know how to display that); traditionally the terminal
encoding has been euc-jp for Unix systems and shift-JIS for Windows and
Apple systems; lately the terminal encoding has been some sort of Unicode
for most systems.

The long and the short of it is, to *send* Japanese mail properly (by
"properly", I mean "so that most Japanese-aware MUAs will know how to
read it"), you need software that will transcode to ISO-2022-JP on the way
to the server.  And, to be able to read emails that are sent by the
vast majority of Japanese email programs, you'll need one that converts
from ISO-2022-JP to whatever your terminal knows how to display.

Personally I used a Japanese-patched version of MUTT for this; it works
well.

 - awh