Freron MailMate

I have noticed that many, though not all, Japanese messages I receive, which are encoded iso-2022-jp and also have attachments cannot be rendered by MailMate. These messages render OK in Apple mail, and the .eml also render OK in quicklook.

I've attached two .eml files to demo this issue. You can see the problem just by dragging these onto MailMate. All mail from this particular company does not render correctly if an attachment is present, and it does otherwise.

These don't display correctly in BBEdit, either--until I use the Reopen Using Encoding command. IIRC, it is not 100% possible to 'sniff' or 'guess' the encoding of Japanese text using heuristics, so this makes sense. In the context of an email client, though, there is usually an explicit indicator of the encoding (as in this case). In pathological cases, though, sometimes broken mail systems lie about the encoding.

Therefore, I wonder how this issue can be best solved. It would be awesome if MM could guess right in every case, but if that is impossible, then perhaps the encoding used to display the message needs to be exposed to the user through a menu command (as is the case with BBEdit and Apple Mail).

I am sure dealing with various legacy multibyte text encoding schemes from the 1980s must be super fun! Enjoy! :-/