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[Ulrich Müller <ulm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Enabling the debugger for function vm-mime-default-face-charset-p shows
that it is called from vm-mime-plain-message-p. Basically it checks if
the message's MIME charset is listed in vm-mime-default-face-charsets
(or if this variable is equal to t).

Now what happens if vm-mime-plain-message-p returns a non-nil value is
that all of VM's MIME decoding is bypassed and the message is just
displayed as-is.

This doesn't make much sense in the context of Emacs 23 (maybe it did 10
years ago, when that variable was introduced). The only messages that
can be correctly displayed this way are the ones whose 8-bit codepoints
agree with the first 256 Unicode characters, which leaves us with us-
ascii and iso-8859-1 only. Any message labelled with another charset
(especially UTF-8) should be passed through VM's decoding.

So, the default value of vm-mime-default-face-charsets (namely ("us-
ascii") on X, ("us-ascii" "iso-8859-1") on TTYs) looks perfectly
reasonable to me. Maybe we should think about discouraging user settings
for this variable, or even deprecate it?

(I've never touched the variable here, and never had any problems that
messages couldn't be displayed.)

-- 
8bit UTF-8 body not being displayed correctly
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/491523
You received this bug notification because you are a member of VM
development team, which is the registrant for vm.

Status in VM (View Mail) for Emacs: Confirmed

Bug description:
Robert Andersson reports:

> On Emacs 23.1.1 (macosx 10.5.8) I have a problem to see non-ascii
> characters (they get garbled) when
> 
>  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> 
> and
> 
>  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
> 
> I wonder if this is really a VM error, when editing the latter email-
> header to quoted-printable on can see the characters as they should
> be. Someone got some thoughts about this?

Perchance, I received today a message sent from our webmail system, which had "8bit" encoding, and VM failed to display it correctly.  When I changed the encoding header to quoted-printable, it displayed correctly.  However, the characters were not actually encoded.  So, VM is indeed behaving strangely.  

This is happening when the entire message body is in utf-8 with "8bit" encoding.  When one of the MIME parts is in utf-8 with "8bit" encoding, VM seems to deal with it ok.  

http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.vm.info/browse_thread/thread/3d9d0e630e0b4e4f#