Pass Control Characters As is

[Daniel Feenberg]

I get a lot of spam with non-ascii character sets. Sometimes it changes the terminal mode so that subsequent text is unreadable. If the mode change is in the message subject, it is sometimes hard to locate which message to delete, as much of the message list can be mangled. I can see that the options "Pass Control Characters As Is" and "Pass C1 Control Characters As Is" are both unchecked. Is there something else I can do? At present I just the current message, leave Alpine, and restart Alpine. But that isn't always the right message to delete, so I worry about deleting a good message.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER

Alpine is version 2.25 running in FreeBSD 13.1, Windows terminal is TeraTerm Pro 4.91.

[Adam H. Kerman]

Daniel Feenberg <feen...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I get a lot of spam with non-ascii character sets. Sometimes it changes
>the terminal mode so that subsequent text is unreadable. If the mode
>change is in the message subject, it is sometimes hard to locate which
>message to delete, as much of the message list can be mangled. I can see
>that the options "Pass Control Characters As Is" and "Pass C1 Control
>Characters As Is" are both unchecked. Is there something else I can do?
>At present I just the current message, leave Alpine, and restart Alpine.
>But that isn't always the right message to delete, so I worry about
>deleting a good message.

Try CTRL-L to redraw the screen.

On rare occassions, an octet in a multi-byte character might be
interpretted as CTRL-S and stop output, so hit CTRL-Q. There's a setting
to deal with this that I forget but I leave it unset. I don't recall if
it's in addition to "Pass Control Characters As Is".