mangled messages

[Mark Mandel]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Gerald Walton <gww at olemiss.edu> wrote:
> >Yes, But in case it doesn't come back to you this way, my blank lines
> >(and your carriage returns) show up as "=20"  in your message to me.
> >And there are other codes displayed as well.
>
> Same here, gww

Ditto. I'm pretty sure these show up for me in many people's posts,
not just Ron's.

Below, Chris describes cleanly and precisely the problem I was vaguely
and loosely referring to as our listserver's "intolerance".

Mark Mandel


On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Chris Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.

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