mangled messages

[Chris Waigl]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:19:23 +0800, Randy Alexander
<strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
>
> There's also the problem with "=20" etc being scattered throughout
> Ron's messages.  It's quite hard on the eyes, but of course it's not
> as bad as "....BhYm91dCB0aGUg....".  I think anyone who sends a
> message that's not plain text comes out completely garbled.  Am I
> right about that?
>
> Randy
>
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:59 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:
>>
>> i had the same problem you did (and just on this one posting of
>> Ron's).  presumably he inadvertently sent it in a format other than
>> plain text.
>>
>> arnold

The format with "=20" at the end of lines is called "quoted-printable" and
the one like ....BhYm91dCB0aGUg...." is called "base64". These days, pretty
much every email program can correctly read AND WRITE these types of
messages. A correctly sent message in these formats will, in addition to
the actual content, contain a header that announces the message's format
and character set.

The problem here is not, really, that when appropriate, modern email
programs send this format. The problem is that in the current
configuration, the software used for managing the ADS-L mailing list is
just ignoring this all-important header information. As it also inserts
additional text into the message body, our email programs are not capable
of decoding the content (which they WOULD be if the header was preserved
and the additional content was not added).

Ultimately, the solution of this problem would come from changing the
configuration of the ADS-L mailing list software.

Best,

Chris Waigl

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