encoded messages in the ADS-L Digest

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

   I'm sending this to Barry Popik with the request that he forward it to ads-l.  Somehow I have better luck sending e-mails to individuals rather than to the entire ads-l list.
 
   Yesterday (Thursday) I sent two ads-l e-mails--this time from my son's computer (in Chicago; I live in Missouri). When I return home tomorrow, I'll resend the two messages from my own computer, and hopefully they'll arrive okay. 
 
Gerald Cohen
 
-----Original Message----- 
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Tom Kysilko 
Sent: Fri 1/2/2004 2:11 PM 
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
Subject: Re: encoded messages in the ADS-L Digest

As Gerald previously noted, the problem is on his wife's computer.  Her Outlook
is set to use UU-encoding instead of MIME.  There is nothing recipients can do
in their e-mail clients to avoid the apparent gibberish.

But if you have WinZip (or any UU-decoder), and you really want to see what
Gerald has to say, do this:
--Highlight the gibberish.
--Copy and paste it into a new text file (using Notepad or your favorite text
editor.
--Save the text file as Whatever.UU
--Open Whatever.UU with the UU-decoder.  (If you have Winzip, in the file-open
dialog under Files of Type select Encoded Files.)

--Tom Kysilko

Quoting "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      encoded messages in the ADS-L Digest
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
>
> Am I the only person for whom Gerald Cohen's posts show up as
> indecipherable blocks of alphanumeric code? E.g.:
>
> IE1pZ2h0ICJtb2RlZCIgdG8gZGVzaWduYXRlIGZhaWx1cmUvc29tZXRoaW5nIHN0dXBpZCBkZXJp
> dmUgZnJvbSAib3V0bW9kZWQiLS1zYXksIGluIGNsb3RoZXMgb3IgbXVzaWM/DQogDQpHZXJhbGQg
> Q29oZW4NCg0KCS0tLS0tT3JpZ2luYWwgP01lc3NhZ2UtLS0tLSANCglGcm9tOiBBbWVyaWNhbiBE
>         [...]
>         [from Digest for 31 Dec 2003 to 1 Jan 2004 (#2004-2)]
>
> If so, there may be some setting I can apply to my mailreader. But I
> greatly fear that that is not the case, since these blocks show up
> embedded in Digests of otherwise clear text.
>
> -- Mark A. Mandel
>    Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania