At 08:34 AM 2/11/2002 -0500, newtontalk_at_newtontalk.net wrote:
>I'm curious if anyone else sees strange characters in messages sent to the
>mailing list? For instance, Woo Lee's messages have a lot of "=" (not
>picking on him, I get plenty of weird characters from other people's
>posts).
Others have replied, but let me share my experience that quoted-printable
encoded messages generally don't survive on a DIGEST. I think in a digest
environment, where the list server software is recieving messages with
us-ascii and quoted-printable encodings (among others), concatenating them
together and remailing them, the digest software doesn't usually upconvert
the entire digest to quoted-printable and send out with a MIME header
specifying that encoding. Rather, the whole digest goes out with no MIME
header or encoding specified. So the e-mail client (Eudora in my case)
doesn't know that some (but not all) of the messages within the digest are
quoted-printable, and so the whole thing gets displayed in the default
decoding (plain text in my case) and instead of seeing nice diacritical
marks I get equals signs and hex digits.
I imagine that a smart list server program could upconvert the entire
digest to quoted-printable and therefore preserve the encodings, or could
downconvert quoted-printable to nearest-match in us-ascii, or better still
use MULTIPART headers to specify which messages go with which type of
encoding. But then the whole thing gets ugly for non-MIME compatible mail
readers...
In all the time I have participated in mailing lists, digests never get
quoted-printable right, whereas individual messages often do.
-Jeremy
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