Garbled messages

[Joel S. Berson]

I think John is right on the ball.

John has described how to set to plain text with Gmail; with Eudora,
it's Tools/Options/Styled Text/when sending mail...send plain text only.

One possible difference of opinion:

>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.

I think URL's come through fine in plain text, and don't need any
styling (HTML or whatever) or encoding.  They are composed from only
the characters of the (loosely speaking) ASCII character set (or more
precisely, from ISO 8859-1 or the corresponding subset of
Unicode).  I think email software (e.g., Eudora) recognizes URLs by
their format, and turns them into links.  I say this based upon my
experience with another list, which prohibits styled text.  URLs come
through clickable.  And I just tried a version of John's
experiment--I sent a message, using plain text, that contained a URL,
to myself; it arrived with a clickable URL (using Eudora).

Joel

At 1/15/2006 12:26 PM, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       John McChesney-Young <panis at PACBELL.NET>
>Subject:      Re: Garbled messages
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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.  ***