[lug] Pine anomaly

[John Karns]

I have been using Pine since about 1994, but have been considering
switching to mutt.  In particular, I ocassionally receive a msg which has
a "header" in the msg body in the form:

--------------F648FCB192B8921F4D2FDE82
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

then the text below that.  When I open the msg in Pine, it doesn't show
any text whatsoever (not even the lines above), just a blank screen, as if
the sender had not typed any text.  Anyone have an explanation for that?
Are those lines above part of the mail specs as given in the RFC's, and
therefore something that pine should be able to handle?

Opening the msg with mutt, however, does display the msg.  I probably
would have switched to mutt some time ago, except for the fact that it has
some quirks as well, such as when I reply to a msg, it includes the
original as an attachment, rather than in the msg body with lines preceded
by "> " as pine defaults to doing.  I'm sure that this feature is
configurable in mutt, but I haven't wanted to spend the time to customize
it to my liking.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net