Hey All,

I have a terminal-only account and my ISP has recently updated the hardware that I use for this and, coincidentally, updated the OS from a years old version of Gentoo to what I believe is a fairly recent update. The file /etc/gentoo-release contains the line: Gentoo Base System release 2.6.

Everything I do on this machine is via a terminal interface only. Access to it is via ssh, and I use GNU screen to create some virtual terminal windows. To my knowledge, there is not even a desktop environment installed on the platform.

As part of all of this the terminal-based email program, mutt, was updated to version Mutt 1.10.1 (2018-07-13, gentoo-1.10.1/r0). I'm a long-time user of this application, but I'm encountering a weird effect that I've never come across before: In email replies, the quoted text from the email that I'm replying to appears to contain terminal control escape sequences. Here's an example message from myself to my gmail account that I've gotten into a reply window,

-----------------begin included email message-------------
From: john r red-horse <jrredho@swcp.com>
To: john red-horse <jrredho@gmail.com>
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: OpenSSL 1.1.1 Is Released
Reply-To:
In-Reply-To: <A32BA8F9-99F4-4D8C-BB5D-E9BF8E31AA20@swcp.com>

This is a test.

john r red-horse wrote:
> ^[[38;5;0m^[[48;5;0m^[[38;5;15m ^[[38;5;21mhttp://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2018/09/11/release111/

-----------------end included email message-------------

Am I the only user that's come across this? I've been using an older version of the gentoo/mutt via ssh/screen in the same TERM=xterm-color combination for several years; this is a new one.

Many thanks,
john

Hi,

those look like colour escape codes. If you are doing all of this under screen they you should probably set TERM=screen-256color or similar.

Evo2.

P.S.
If its installed, I highly recommend trying out tmux as a replacement for screen.

Hey Evo2,

Thanks for responding to this. Your guess was exactly what I thought too. Moving along that line, I tried to do a limited bit of sleuthing and have determined that this effect only occurred when I was replying to messages that were html formatted. I *think* that what I'm seeing has to do with the fact that mutt first uses autoview to translate such messages. In my case, I use 'elinks -dump' via my ~/.mailcap. This is a totally new effect since the system OS update as I've used this mailcap setup for quite some time now.

I switched to using 'lynx -dump' for the autoview scenario and restricted my use of elinks to the 'copiousoutput' case only and things are being quoted correctly. I'll mark this thread as solved asap.

Thanks again!

cheers,
john