APPROVE COMMIT NOTE: This patch has been committed. Previous to this change, if your default buffer-file-coding-system was UTF-8, your MIME content-transfer-encoding 8bit, and the mails you FCCed had non-ASCII content, the act of FCCing would read in the buffer as binary and write it out to the same file as UTF-8, changing every non-ASCII octet to its UTF-8 equivalent. On every FCC to the folder. Which is not healthy for your data. Patch posted to xemacs-beta back in December, with message ID 16848.46742.104431.578670.dm0(a)vm.parhasard.net . xemacs-packages/mail-lib/ChangeLog addition: 2005-04-02 Aidan Kehoe <kehoea(a)parhasard.net&gt; * sendmail.el (mail-do-fcc): Write the Unix mail file using the binary coding system, as is appropriate for a file where non-ASCII characters are encoded using separate MIME character sets for every message, and thus no other single Mule coding system is appropriate. XEmacs Packages source patch: Diff command: cvs -q diff -u Files affected: xemacs-packages/mail-lib/sendmail.el Index: xemacs-packages/mail-lib/sendmail.el =================================================================== RCS file: /pack/xemacscvs/XEmacs/packages/xemacs-packages/mail-lib/sendmail.el,v retrieving revision 1.18 diff -u -u -r1.18 sendmail.el --- xemacs-packages/mail-lib/sendmail.el 2004/11/08 02:50:32 1.18 +++ xemacs-packages/mail-lib/sendmail.el 2005/04/01 22:21:15 ＠＠ -1225,8 +1225,16 ＠＠ (insert "\n\C-_") (write-region (point-min) (point-max) (car fcc-list) t) (erase-buffer))) - (write-region - (1+ (point-min)) (point-max) (car fcc-list) t))) + ;; MIME processing should have eliminated any characters + ;; outside the range 0-255; if MIME processing hasn't been + ;; done, there's no reasonable expectation that the data will + ;; be preserved in a Unix mailbox, so we just write tildes for + ;; those chars. We set the coding system for write to 'binary + ;; to prevent any double-encoding that may occur if + ;; buffer-file-coding-system has been initialised to a + ;; non-binary-compatible coding system like, say, UTF-8. + (let ((coding-system-for-write 'binary)) + (write-region (1+ (point-min)) (point-max) (car fcc-list) t)))) (and buffer (not dont-write-the-file) (with-current-buffer buffer (set-visited-file-modtime)))) -- “I, for instance, am gung-ho about open source because my family is being held hostage in Rob Malda’s basement. But who fact-checks me, or Enderle, when we say something in public? No-one!” -- Danny O’Brien