Email character set conversion in procmail

[Paul Howarth]

Todd Zullinger wrote:
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> Paul Howarth wrote:
>> Does anyone have a procmail recipe for email character set
>> conversion? I help to run an email newsletter, where people send in
>> contributions that get edited together into a single message that is
>> then sent out to all the list members. It would be nice if all of
>> the incoming messages were in the same character set (e.g. utf8,
>> iso-8859-1, whatever) from the point of view of pasting them into a
>> single document, but I haven't been able to find a recipe for doing
>> this automatically. Any suggestions?
> 
> Something piping the mail through iconv or recode is what I'd think
> you want.  Here's one I found via google and tweaked a little:
> 
> # convert utf to latin (if the subject is translate me)
> :0
> * ^Subject: translate me$
> * ^Content-Type: text/(plain|html); .*charset=.?utf-8
> {
>     :0 fbw
>         |iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT
> 
>     :0 fhw
>         * ^Content-Type: text/plain
>         |formail -c -i "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1"
> 
>     :0 Efhw
>         * ^Content-Type: text/html
>         |formail -c -i "Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
> }
> 
> Maybe that'll get you started on a good solution.  Or maybe it will
> inspire someone that knows much better than I to post a better
> solution. :)
> 
> It's probably better to go in the other direction, from latin to utf,
> as there are bound to be characters in utf that can't get converted to
> latin.  But I'm not a charset guru so it's all guesswork for me.

I'll have a play with this and see how far I get. However, it's not 
going to help with multipart/alternative mail so I'd need something 
MIME-aware for that. Anyone got any suggestions?

Paul.