Re: [PATCH] Teach applymbox to keep the Subject: line.

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

The fact is, anybody who doesn't edit the emails that come in is BROKEN. 
There are two kinds of emails:

 - the nicely formatted ones where the author follows all the rules

   This kind of email doesn't need MIME decoding anyway.

That depends on what the rules are, but I consider detecting B
encodings in the header fields and transliterating it into UTF-8
a good idea (although that sometimes is a lossy conversion
depending on the original charset).

Remember this one that prompted me to do the header folding?

    From: YOSHIFUJI Hideaki / =?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCNUhGIzFRTEAbKEI=?= 
            [off-list ref]

 - the others

   ..., trying to handle it 
   automatically is WRONG WRONG WRONG.
   And if it's mime-encoded you often have trouble editing it anyway.

Ergo: if somebody sends you mime-encoded patches, hit them with a baseball 
bat (politely) and teach them not to do that. "Fixing" the tools really 
will just make things worse if it means that you apply raw emails without 
having edited them.

I agree with you in principle and that is why I always run
applymbox with the -q flag.  Maybe I should start trying the
baseball bat approach to see what happens.