FW: [ADS-L] John Baker's entries

[Baker, John]

        I apologize for posts that, at least for some, were indecipherable binary code.  This apparently happens when I am out of the office and access my email server via a web-based email client.  There is no client-based way for me to change the configuration.  I'll try to explore alternatives for out-of-office posts in the future and avoid the gibberish.  My thanks to Michael Quinion for figuring out what was going on.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Quinion [mailto:TheEditor at worldwidewords.org]
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 8:44 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Cc: Baker, John
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] John Baker's entries


> Looks like John has private key encryption turned on.  Been
> fooling around with PGP, John?

No, it's not that. The full headers show what's happening:

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding:  base64

UTF-8 is a method of coding Unicode, especially under Unix systems.
Base-64 is an encoding system for sending binary code (which UTF-8
effectively is) by e-mail.

I hadn't noticed a problem with John Baker's posts because my mail
program (Pegasus) quite happily converts that code back into plain
text. If your mailer doesn't have that capability, you see the
encoded data instead.

Ensuring that only plain text is entered won't make any difference to
the outgoing message, as the mail program, in this case Microsoft
Exchange, will encode it as it sends it. I don't have any experience
with MS Exchange V6.0, so can't advise, but there surely ought to be
some option somewhere to change the format of transmitted messages.


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>