[SLUG] Irritating code instead of normal characters

[Al Girling]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 06:27:35PM BST, Paul Teasdale wrote:
<Little SNIP>
> 
> Hi Al,

Hi Paul,

Sorry I've taken a while to respond to your reply, but I've been very
busy this week.

> I could be wrong on this one but I think it's the because the content type 
> encoding is 7-bit thus giving you the ascii characters from 1 to 127 and you 
> would need 8 bits to be able to represent a character at 163 (Hex: A3). This 
> means that any characters above 127 needs to be represented with only the 
> characters available between 1 to 127 hence the =A3. This 7-bit format is 
> known as quoted-printable.

This makes a lot of sense.  Cheers!

> Furthermore I see the £ signs correctly in your e-mail you posted to the list 
> and if I look at the headers sure enough the content type encoding is 8 bit 
> (and the character set is iso-8859-1 which I would also expect to see)

So at least I'm sending messages with the correct encoding and charset.
This is good to know.

> I'm not sure why the reply message is 7-bit but it may be a case that the 
> other users e-mail client is set to send in "US ASCII" only regardless (which 
> is a 7-bit character set only) or it may be one of the gateways that the 
> e-mail has passed through does not support 8-bit extended character sets such 
> as ISO 8859-1 and therefore has changed the encoding of the message but 
> that's unlikely these days. My best guess as to why this has happened is that 
> the e-mail has defaulted to 7-bit quoted printable simply because the 
> Content-Type mail header is not defined (but don't ask me why it's not 
> defined :)

>From this can I deduce that it's the RYA end of things most likely at
fault here.  I guess there's probably a procmail/formail recipe which
could detect and correct this sort of thing, but that's a whole
different kettle of fish!

> Hope this is of some helps even if I can't say exactly what caused the problem 
> originally.

This has been a great help.  Many thanks Paul.

Toodle pip,

Al

-- 
Al Girling
Linux User: #290080            <http://counter.li.org>
Scarborough Linux User Group   <http://www.scarborough.lug.org.uk>