fails with iconv-lite unsupported encoding error about encoding HOT 3 CLOSED

If you want to use iconv you should add it to the dependencies of your own project. If it is available then it used by default. The thing with iconv is that it fails to build on several systems and in case of Nodemailer it made up something like 90% of the size of the installed module while it wasn't even needed. Including iconv made Nodemailer's install time several times longer (because of the compilation time) and the installed module size a lot bigger, so I removed it.

Additionally there's a pending issue for iconv-lite to support iso-2022-jp but I saw that you already found it.

from encoding.

@andris9 I'm interested in hearing why optional dependencies don't work for this use case

from encoding.

Optional dependencies would work, no question about that – the issue is that in case of Nodemailer having iconv installed even as an optional dep (and optional deps are always installed, at least the installation is tried by npm) was not desirable (the encoding module was once part of Nodemailer, I moved it to a separate module long time after Nodemailer was created).

In Windows (think of Azure) you would get tons of error messages (actually warnings, but scary enough that I got a lot of complaints and "bug" reports). In *nix the installed module size would be 10 times larger than without iconv (with iconv 14 MB, without 1.4 MB) and install time would be several times longer (fresh uncached install without iconv ~5 sec, with iconv ~ 4min) and this for no reason whatsoever – all encoding issues that Nodemailer has can easily be covered by iconv-lite.

Today encoding is not part of Nodemailer anymore, I decided to use iconv-lite directly, so in theory it would be possible to reinclude iconv as a dependency for encoding but I really do not want to touch it, I think it works just fine as it already is.

from encoding.