Re: Procmail filtering question

On Tue, 26 May 2020 16:39:04 +0300
Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> wrote:

> Unfortunately, this is the most "normal" of the formats that you are
> going to get with e-mail. Since none of the software that generates or
> reformats e-mail messages along the way has any idea what other
> software will be used to accept, transfer, or process the message,
> none of it can rely on anything else being able to process anything
> other than "simple" plain text with all characters being in the
> US-ASCII character set. Thus, if somebody wants to include, say, a
> pretty long dash or chevrons, the only way to do that is to use a
> special format for encoding them, a special format for saying "this
> here is a character that is outside the US-ASCII character set, I'll
> tell you how it is represented in UTF-8, but since its UTF-8
> representation itself depends on bytes that are outside the US-ASCII
> character set, here's a marker that says that the next couple of
> characters are base64-encoded representations of UTF-8 encoded
> characters".
> 
> Anything that wants to process e-mail messages the way they are to be
> displayed to the end-user should be able to decode MIME-encoded
> content, including MIME-encoded header fields. And... unfortunately,
> here we come once again to the "procmail is kind of outdated, it does
> not really support a couple of things that are sort of essential in
> the current world, is there any way you might switch to other
> message-filtering software?" For example, it looks like at least
> courier-maildrop may be configured to parse MIME-encoded headers:
> http://courier-mail-server.10983.n7.nabble.com/Filtering-mails-with-UTF-8-headers-td18177.html
> (and yes, I know that switching the mail filtering program is not
> trivial at all, but procmail also has other problems, some of which
> people have become accustomed to working around for decades...)

Thanks.

I was wondering, though, whether one could do something like
mda '/usr/bin/formail -s <program that converts to ascii> | procmail'
in the .fetchmailrc file.

- Richard.
-- 
Richard Kimber