Re: Email -> Org-mode: charset problem

[David Maus <dmaus@ictsoc.de>]

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At Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:30:06 +0200,
Karl Voit wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Is there somebody who managed to develop an email to Org-mode bridge
> without having charset problems? (No, I do not use Emacs as a
> MUA[4])
> 
>     Disclaimer: This is not directly related to Org-mode but I guess
>     there are people here with the very same problem.
> 
> I am using a procmail[1] with an entry to forward emails containing
> a keyword in the subject into my inbox.org (where also MobileOrg[2]
> entries are written to).
> 
> This is quite handy since some tasks arrive at emails and I want to
> capture this everywhere (smartphone, webmail, ...) using a simply
> email forward.
> 
> Unfortunately I get weird stuff like uuencoded things, UTF-8 in
> ASCII, ... which messes up my inbox.org and I am not able to read it
> afterwards.[5]
> 
> I guess this is because procmail and formail[3] – the tools I am
> using to extract mail infos to append to the org-file – are
> 7-bit-only or similar.
>
> If this is the case, I guess I'll have to find a different approach
> for this purpose.
> 
> Any ideas?


As far as I know a lot, if not most, email messages are transfered in
7bit for backward compatibility reasons and getting things other than
text/plain; charset=us-ascii across the net via email requires a lot
of things to consider (RFC2045-49 in all their glory). And if you
receive message from others, their mua might get things wrong and you
end up with things like utf-8 in ascii.

So dumping the raw message won't help, you need functions for
processing the raw message informaton.

Here's an idea (or two).

I do use an Emacs base mua (Wanderlust) and recently started to file
reference notes for certain messages. Because in cases I want to keept
the message (e.g. an interesting usenet post) I save the raw message
to a temporary file and add it as an attachment. This works nice,
although I'd really like to have an automated way of save+attache when
capturing.

So, what about org-capture? You could use a script that serializes the
raw message to disk and -- somehow -- calls capture with a reference
to this file. Emacs opens the mail file and extracts information
required for the template using the build-in MIME libaries (mml-*
IIRC) which are capable of correctly parsing and if necessary decoding
(e.g. quoted printable encoded letters in the subject). After
extracting the information Emacs creates the appropriate capture
entry, somehow adds the message file as attachment and finishes the
capture process.

-or-

Don't dump the message in the org buffer "as is", but wrap it in a
#+begin_src <MIME MODE> where MIME-MODE is the build in mode for
decoding MIME messages. You could then view the original message with
C-c ' -- only task left is dealing with the subject line for the entry
headline.

Best,
  -- David
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