[SLUG] Irritating code instead of normal characters

[Paul Teasdale]

On Thursday 05 Aug 2004 08:53, Al Girling wrote:
>
> <SNIP>
>
> From this can I deduce that it's the RYA end of things most likely at
> fault here.
>

Ummmm! I could be wrong of course!!

I don't like to spread mis-information but I am trying to be more proactive 
for the LUG and I have come up with a more likely theory that would answer 
your problems to the irritating characters.

Basically it may be Mutt that has started the issue you mention in your 
original e-mail (irritating chars) and Fintan may be right in that it's a 
Mutt thing. 

Here is what I have done. Use Mutt to send a normal e-mail to a user on my 
network. Mutt chooses by default 'us-ascii' which is 7-bit so long as I don't 
type any extended characters like the £ sign in the message (BTW if I do then 
Mutt chooses an 8 bit 'unknown' character set - so it claims? I don't know 
what the 'unknown' is about because I don't use Mutt normally).

Then I picked up the e-mail with KMail and added a reply to the message with 
some £ signs in etc. All the time I was ensuring that KMail was set to reply 
in the same character set the original e-mail was received in (ie: us-ascii).

Then I went back to Mutt and picked up the reply e-mail as sent by KMail. Low 
and behold the pound signs did not show _however_ I got question marks 
instead of the £ signs and not the =A3 business that you get. It maybe the 
case that Outlook does something else with the mail hence maybe =A3 instead 
of ?. I may try this at some point :)

What this does prove however is that if you send an e-mail in a specific 
format and the recipient's e-mail client keeps that format and also the 
recipient replies with some characters not supported by the original format 
then they get replaced by 'irritating characters'.

So the long and short of it is that Mutt may have started the chain of events 
that lead to the problem you mention.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Paul.

PS: Let me know if you want a lift on Tuesday evening. 

-- 
Linux User #351704 (http://counter.li.org)
Scarborough LUG Member (http://www.scarborough.lug.org.uk)
Another Happy Slacker!! (http://www.slackware.com)