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

[Geoff Nathan]

One of the issues is that the block of encoded text has a > character at the beginning of each line, so you can't just 'copy and paste' into one of these online decoders--you have to strip out all the wedge characters first. 

Geoffrey S. Nathan 
Faculty Liaison, C&IT 
and Professor, Linguistics Program 
http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/ 
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT) 

Nobody at Wayne State will EVER ask you for your password. Never send it to anyone in an email, no matter how authentic the email looks. 

----- Original Message -----

> From: "Michael Quinion" <michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: Friday, April 10, 2015 4:10:51 AM
> Subject: Re: Physical Wallet, Hardware Wallet - PLAIN TEXT THIS TIME

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Michael Quinion <michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG>
> Organization: World Wide Words
> Subject: Re: Physical Wallet, Hardware Wallet - PLAIN TEXT THIS TIME
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> > 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

> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org