It fells almost like software-archeology to dig through these old RCS revision logs. I can trace back certain constructs in there to my days at aut.alcatel.at and to hints from Klaus Reichl, emacs geek extraordinaire in the Elektra team.

this is how it looks when az has a bad day and takes a big hammer to the mh-e defaults:

;; gehts scheissn mit die bunten smileys...
(setq mh-graphical-smileys-flag nil)