[MlMt] Manually choosing text encoding?

[Pete Resnick]

On 15 Apr 2026, at 6:59, Fjölnir Ásgeirsson wrote:

> I recently received a Shift-JIS encoded email(!).

Wow! It's been well more than a decade (maybe 2) since I've seen that 
encoding!

> And Mailmate was not able to guess the correct encoding to use and I 
> just saw garbled text (Fastmail WebUI and Apple Mail handled it fine). 
> I looked for an option to choose which text encoding to use, and 
> couldn’t find it. Is that not possible?

Unless it's very well hidden, I don't see any way to do it in the 
documentation. That said, the MailMate help says:

> MailMate can handle almost any kind of character encoding when 
> receiving emails. This includes numerous workarounds for wrongly 
> encoded emails, but when generating emails MailMate only uses 
> “UTF-8”. This is not configurable.

It's been a long while since I've coded on the Mac, but the above says 
to me that Benny is passing the message through the MacOS "take a guess" 
i18n facility when he can, and I'd be really surprised that Apple Mail 
did it much differently. I'd be curious: When you "Show Raw Message" 
under the "View" menu (⌥⌘U), what does the "charset" parameter in 
the "Content-Type" field say for the message (or the part with the 
Shift-JIS in it)?

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best