[Ads-l] Physical Wallet, Hardware Wallet - PLAIN TEXT THIS TIME

[Michael Quinion]

> W3BsZWFzZSBhY2NlcHQgbXldIEFwb2xvZ2llcyBmb3IgdGhlIGdvYmJsZWR5Z29vayB5ZXN0ZXJ
> ... etc

As with mail from a very few other posters, I received this message in 
encoded format. Following recent discussion I looked into it.

It's in a coding scheme called base-64. Copying the code into a new file 
with the .b64 extension and opening it in WinZip allows me to read it as 
plain text. Base-64 is a very common way of coding emails that may contain 
accented or special characters; in itself this is unremarkable (I send my 
newsletters in this format, for example).

The problem is that it isn't signalled as such in the message. If it were 
within a conventional MIME-tagged block, my mail reader (Pegasus Mail) 
would have no trouble decoding it. Either the LISTSERV system is stripping 
the MIME header off (very unlikely) or the message is being sent by a 
mailer that for some reason doesn't flag the text's encoding.

I would guess from comments by others on the list that some mail readers 
are able to decode the text without the MIME headers being present.

--
Michael Quinion
World Wide Words
Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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