Re: [nmh-workers] To/cc decode or not to/cc decode

[Ken Hornstein]

>Took me a while to pin down a double appearance of the message context
>(a legacy mhl.headers MessageName entry, in the end), but while doing
>that I noticed that the default (at least under Debian) To: and cc:
>lines in mhl.headers are just empty, implicitly not decoding their
>content, while the From: line does extra work:
>
>  From:formatfield="%(unquote(decode{text}))"
>
>.. now actually I'm seeing unreadable garbage in my To: lines quite
>frequently, so adding the same format tweak to To: and cc: seems to make
>sense.  Any good reason not to do this, or why this isn't the default
>for To: and cc: as well as From:?

I was curious, so I went and looked.  It seems we never did this because
... we never did it.

It's been that way from the beginning of nmh.  RFC 2047 decoding was
never in stock MH, but it was added somewhere along the way by Richard
Coleman during his initial nmh work.  That's where the "decode" option
was added to mhl (stock MH had "formatfield").  When those examples were
added to the default mhl format files, they were just added to the
>From and Subject components.  I do not know why they were not added
to To: and cc: as well; I suspect the issue was that they were relatively
infreqently seen in those headers.

I cannot think of a reason to not add them.  I think we should add them
to the defaults; any objections?

--Ken