9fans archive / 1998 / 09 / 60 /    prev next

From: arisawa@ar.... arisawa@ar....
Subject: [9fans] Wish list for acme mail handler
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 03:19:05 -0400 (EDT)

Hello!

Kenji Okamoto wrote:
>Is it possible to pipe all the content of a window to another
>in acme?  If this is possible, my problem will be solved very
>easily.
I cannot understand what you really want to do by this.
I assume you want to read/write Japanese mail.

If you want to preprocess your incoming mail, you can do by
piping incoming mail to your mail box.

Japanese mails are encoded using jis.
Subject field is encoded by Mime if Japanese is used there.
I think these incoming mail should be translated to local
encoding before they are stored in local mail box.

You can handle Mime encoding Japanese mail by `nkf' with
combination of `tcs'.
You can find Plan9 version of `nkf' at ftp://plan9.aichi-u.ac.jp/

Mine mail has a lot of things.
However most of mime mails I have ever received include nothing
except plain text. So `nkf' may be enough.
Oh, someone -- a beginner? -- sent me a mime mail with Excel.
So I answered him that I don't have Excel and required him to
send the data using plain text.

It will be difficult to send Japanese mail from Plan9 to internet.
We must encode the mail to jis.
The translation can be automatically done by piping.
The position to pipe is /mail/lib/qmail.
Subject must be encoded to mime format if Japanese is used there.
There is a tool for this purpose on UNIX - MimeKit by Satoh -.
And this is the only one I know.

Porting MimiKit to Plan9 will be difficult.
I tried a few months ago, and I gave up.
The sources are too old and dirty, and more, include too many bugs.
So rigorous Plan9 compiler do not accept them.

Kenji Arisawa
E-mail: arisawa@aic...