Garbled messages

[John McChesney-Young]

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:19:36 -0800, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> Thank you very much for the enlightenment, Ben. I checked my (Mac)
> Gmail settings and saw that Format was set to UTF-8. I've reset it to
> "Default," the only other choice. Hopefully, matters are now
> straightened out.

I should begin with a caveat: I'm not an expert in such matters by any
means, but ...

If the problem is due to plain text vs. RTF, changing the setting from
Outgoing message encoding: Unicode to Outgoing message encoding: Default
won't fix it. This is an issue of *message* encoding rather than
*character* encoding. In Gmail, switching from RTF to plain text (or back)
is done when you have a sendable message on the screen.

After you hit the Compose Mail button in the upper left of the screen (or
Reply or Forward or anything else that gives you a composition window),
right above the window where your words appear there will be either "Rich
formatting >>" or a menu bar of formatting choices - B [for Bold], I [for
Italic], etc. - followed by a clickable link to "<< Plain text". Those two
links toggle you back and forth from text to RTF and back, and Gmail
remembers which you used last and offers that again the next time you have
a message to be sent. Even if you open a new message window and switch
 from one format to the other and immediately discard the message without
sending it or even putting anything into any fields, it remembers what
you'd wanted.

I experimented by sending myself messages in RTF from my Gmail account to
my POP account both with and without a URL and didn't have any trouble
reading them, so somewhere a server (possibly the one running the ADS list
at UGA?) is where the encoding format problem lies.

There are web-based converters which will turn that apparently-random
gibberish back into readable text. A Google search for "Base64 converter"
will provide quite a few sites, one of which is:

http://www.olympus-zone.net/page_1078_en_Blue.html

This successfully deciphered a sample garbled message from WG I found in
my Trash (I'm using the current version of Opera Mail for Mac, and it's
had trouble with a few recent messages from WG and BP).

Unicode doesn't always display correctly when used in e-mail, depending on
which e-mail program or browser the reader is using, but using Unicode on
this particular list shouldn't normally be a problem and at worst won't
generate something totally unreadable (unless someone posts in a language
using an entirely different character set, like Chinese). The main
potential problem that comes to mind is that IPA characters might display
to some people either as something entirely different or as little
rectangular boxes, but punctuation, numbers, and the alphabet are pretty
safe cross-platform and cross-application: if you can see a character on
the keys of your English-language keyboard, other people using the same
keyboard will almost certainly see what you've intended. Messages written
on keyboards (or using keyboard layouts [[1]]) intended for other
languages might or might not make it through correctly; for example,
messages I get in French not uncommonly display accented letters as
something wildly different from the intended characters.

When using browser-based e-mail like Gmail, you might be able to fix
messages that display incorrect characters (but not ones with solid blocks
of Base64 characters) by fiddling with the character encoding settings,
which will be found in different places in different browsers and
different platforms; in (e.g.) Firefox for Mac the settings are in View ->
Character Encoding (also accessible via the Preferences, but this message
is already too long).

Sorry for the length of the message.

John

[[1]] Chosen in Mac OS 10.2 in System Preferences -> International ->
Input Menu or by pull-down menu from the flag just to the right of the
Help menu at the top of applications that let you write, if there's a flag
there; I'm sorry that I don't know about 10.3 or 10.4 but expect it's
something similar.

--
*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis~at~pacbell.net  **  Berkeley,
California, U.S.A.  ***