Petrus de Calguarium <kwhiskerz@...> writes: > > When I receive system mail, I read it on the command line with the 'mail' program. It appears to be called > Heirloom Mail version 12.4 7/29/08. > > Now, as I scroll down, I see that the system mail is sent as: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ANSI_X3.4-1968" > > However, my system is set up to use UTF-8. Why is this charset wrong, or not respecting my system setting? How > can I get it corrected? > Hi, I hope this explains both logwatch mail and interactive mail. Formatting of mail (headers and body) by logwatch script (in Perl): less /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/logwatch.pl ... my $report_finish = "\n ###################### Logwatch End ... ... #Add MIME ... if ( $outtype_html ) { $out_mime .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\n\n"; } else { $out_mime .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\n\n"; } ... This is an example of my logwatch mail: >From root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Wed Jul 21 08:33:07 2010 Return-Path: <root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:33:05 +0200 To: root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx From: logwatch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Logwatch for localhost.localdomain (Linux) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Status: RO ################### Logwatch 7.3.6 (05/19/07) #################### ... So, the logwatch formats the mail programmatically (line by line), and this explains the arbitrary fixed string charset="iso-8859-1". On the other hand, if I prepare mail interactively in my terminal, formatted by the mail agent, it is subjected to that mail agent's rules. [jb@localhost ~]$ env |grep LANG LANG=en_US.UTF-8 $ man mail ... sendcharsets A comma-separated list of character set names that can be used in Internet mail. When a message that contains characters not representable in US-ASCII is prepared for sending, mailx tries to convert its text to each of the given character sets in order and uses the first appropriate one. The default is ‘utf-8’. Character sets assigned to this variable should be ordered in ascending complexity. That is, the list should start with e.g. ‘iso-8859-1’ for compatibility with older mail clients, might contain some other language-specific character sets, and should end with ‘utf-8’ to handle messages that combine texts in multi- ple languages. ... $ cat /etc/mail.rc ... # Outgoing messages are sent in ISO-8859-1 if all their characters are # representable in it, otherwise in UTF-8. set sendcharsets=iso-8859-1,utf-8 ... [jb@localhost ~]$ mail root Subject: test charset A line of text. --> Ctl-D to finish [jb@localhost ~]$ mail Heirloom Mail version 12.4 7/29/08. Type ? for help. "/var/spool/mail/jb": 2 messages 2 unread >U 1 logwatch@xxxxxxxxxxx Tue Jul 27 07:35 100/2779 "Logwatch for localhos" U 2 JB Tue Jul 27 08:23 21/799 "test charset" & 2 Message 2: >From jb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Tue Jul 27 08:23:13 2010 Return-Path: <jb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> From: JB <jb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:23:12 +0200 To: root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: test charset User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.4 7/29/08 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Status: RO A line of text. & JB -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines