[SLUG] Irritating code instead of normal characters

[Al Girling]

On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 10:21:14PM BST, Paul Teasdale wrote:
> 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!!

Damn! ;)

> 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 :)

If you remember (cast your mind back to Dec 2003) I had a similar
problem with £ symbols being displayed as ? symbols.  This was because
'locales' had not been installed correctly.  Once this was done
everything seemed well until this recent episode with =A3 etc.

> 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 believe you're correct with this, however, this is because I've not
had mutt setup correctly.  I've spent a lot of time searching through
the archives of mutt mails and experimenting.  I now have these
included in my .muttrc.

set charset="iso-8859-1"

set send_charset="iso-8859-1"

set allow_8bit

I must confess I'm not certain about their function etc. as the mutt
manual is suitably vague.  So I've no alternative but to try the suck
the wires to see if they're live approach. :(

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

I've sent you a message about Tuesday night that contains no £ symbols
could you reply with some included to see if this behaviour is repeated.

Many thanks.

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