It looks like this was a well-intentioned backwards compat hack for
previewing the output of hg email in a stable way. Unfortunately I
think this hack's time has come, because Python 3 does a much better
job of ensuring it actually emits *valid* email messages. In
particular, Python 2 would blindly trust us that the bytes we handed
it were valid for the encoding we claimed, but Python 3 has some more
sniff-tests that we end up failing.
As a result, if we're going to print an email to the terminal, try
us-ascii first, but if that fails go straight to iso-8859-1 which
should be reasonably readable for ascii-compatible patch bodies. This
*will* be a breaking change for ascii-incompatible textual patch
content, but I don't think that's avoidable if we want to continue
using the email library from the stdlib.
.. bc::
Emails from the patchbomb extension will always be printed as though they are iso-8859-1 if they're not valid us-ascii. Previously, previewed emails were always claimed to be us-ascii and might contain invalid byte sequences.