So I have an accent in my family name, as you can see from the From header here. This has a tendency of finding the greatest and finest UTF-8 bug, and often no one believes me because they don't have that interesting property. Notmuch has been bugging me with such a problem for ages now. When I forward a mail, the accents in my name (or in the signature inserted) are broken. (Interstingly, I haven't *actually* been bothered by that bug for a while because I was using Emacs through an SSH console. Now, I'm using Emacs within a X11 terminal instead, "GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.14.5) of 2015-03-07 on trouble, modified by Debian".) Interestingly, piping that buffer into patebinit doesn't yield any errors: http://paste.debian.net/378776/ Yet there is clearly an issue while writing the buffer, as you can see on this screenshot: http://paste.anarc.at/snap-2016.02.05-17.28.30.png Look at the buffer on the bottom: my accent (a é) is all busted in the From line, even though it is perfectly fine in *this* buffer. If I try to send that message (say to the `devnull` recipient), I get a nasty warning: ``` These default coding systems were tried to encode text in the buffer `1454711375.18796_680127_47.angela': (utf-8-unix (21 . 4194243) (22 . 4194217)) However, each of them encountered characters it couldn't encode: utf-8-unix cannot encode these: \303 \251 Click on a character (or switch to this window by `C-x o' and select the characters by RET) to jump to the place it appears, where `C-u C-x =' will give information about it. Select one of the safe coding systems listed below, or cancel the writing with C-g and edit the buffer to remove or modify the problematic characters, or specify any other coding system (and risk losing the problematic characters). raw-text no-conversion ``` (Note that I rewrote the actual escape characters above to avoid to be "backslash number number number" instead of the actual escape sequence to avoid trouble, as I am sending this through emacs as well.) I usually [PLOKTA][1] my way through that warning, but I have no idea if the recipient receives something that is jumbled up or not. Besides, PLOKTA is not fun, I just feel like I look like this: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/234/765/b7e.jpg [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOKTA This sure smells like double-encoding. Is this notmuch's fault or message-mode, and how can i fix this stuff? This is notmuch 0.18 in Debian jessie. Thanks for any advice, A. -- Code is law. - Lawrence Lessig