Following the directions in /usr/share/doc/semi-1.14.3/rmail-mime/README.en.gz, I do "(setq rmail-enable-mime t)". When I then attempt to view a MIME message in an rmail buffer, I get the error "Feature `rmail-mime' not provided" and the message is not displayed in any sort of MIME-formatted mode. When I then attempt to run "(load-library "rmail-mime")" I get "Cannot open load file mime" because mime-view.el is trying to to "(require 'mime)" or some such thing. Basically, semi is inadequately documented (much of the documentation there is, is in Japanese) and does not appear to work out of the box because it depends on a "mime" package which it does not include (and which is not listed in the dependencies of its RPM file).
Can I assume you're using Emacs, not XEmacs? My first reaction is probably better not to use RMail unless you really want to. RMail (the original Emacs mail program) is these days more of historic value IMHO. I recommend using gnus (included with both emacs and xemacs), or mew or wl (available in separate packages). They all have reasonably good MIME support. VMail in XEmacs in also a nice MUA with mime support. I'll take a look at this in due course, though since semi is not being actively worked on these days, unless it's a packaging problem it probably won't be that easy to fix.
Yes, I am using GNU Emacs. I have been using Rmail for over a decade. I have no desire to change. Ditto for GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs. If semi is not going to be made to work properly, then it should be removed from the RHL distribution.
Ok, if you're a long-time then I understand better. semi is known is be hmmm "somewhat broken" at best. The oroginal author wanted to have it included in gnus, but the gnus maintainer would have none of it... Currently semi is only in the distribution since it's required by wl (another Japanese made mua for emacsen). Perhaps semi should just be made a part of wl and not be in a separate package.
For the time being I have removed rmail-mime (and emh) from semi, since they does seem to be much used. RMail in Emacs now has some MIME support, have you tried that?
As far as I can tell, the only Rmail MIME support that comes with the Emacs distribution is support for decoding charsets in MIME automatically. That's much less than what I need. I want to actually handle viewing attachments in incoming messages and adding attachments to outgoing messages. I've got code which does that, which I obtained by downloading some really old, no longer maintained Emacs mime stuff from the Net and hacking it up to actually work with Emacs 21, but I was hoping that somebody had actually added supported, maintained code for MIME within Rmail so I could stop using my gross hack.
Tagoh told me that it is better not to (setq rmail-enable-mime t) when using rmail-mime with rmail. You could try that. I still recommend switching to a newer and better maintained MUA, but I know old habits die hard....
As I said, I just followed the directions in the README file. If they're wrong, they need to be fixed. Perhaps that's a better fix than removing rmail-mime from the semi RPM?
Yeah, but i guess that depends on whether rmail-mime is of any use or not.
Closing this for now. Did you find rmail-mime to be useful?