37.14 Rmail and Coding Systems

Rmail automatically decodes messages which contain non-ASCII characters, just as Emacs does with files you visit and with subprocess output. Rmail uses the standard ‘charset=charset’ header in the message, if any, to determine how the message was encoded by the sender. It maps charset into the corresponding Emacs coding system (see Coding Systems), and uses that coding system to decode message text. If the message header doesn't have the ‘charset’ specification, or if charset is not recognized, Rmail chooses the coding system with the usual Emacs heuristics and defaults (see Recognize Coding).

Occasionally, a message is decoded incorrectly, either because Emacs guessed the wrong coding system in the absence of the ‘charset’ specification, or because the specification was inaccurate. For example, a misconfigured mailer could send a message with a ‘charset=iso-8859-1’ header when the message is actually encoded in koi8-r. When you see the message text garbled, or some of its characters displayed as empty boxes, this may have happened.

You can correct the problem by decoding the message again using the right coding system, if you can figure out or guess which one is right. To do this, invoke the M-x rmail-redecode-body command. It reads the name of a coding system, encodes the message body using whichever coding system was used to decode it before, then redecodes it using the coding system you specified. If you specified the right coding system, the result should be readable.

Decoding and encoding using the wrong coding system is lossless for most encodings, in particular with 8-bit encodings such as iso-8859 or koi8. So, if the initial attempt to redecode the message didn't result in a legible text, you can try other coding systems until you succeed.

With some coding systems, notably those from the iso-2022 family, information can be lost in decoding, so that encoding the message again won't bring back the original incoming text. In such a case, rmail-redecode-body cannot work. However, the problems that call for use of rmail-redecode-body rarely occur with those coding systems. So in practice the command works when you need it.