Fwd: RE: Newsletter Technical Feedback

[Trevor Smith]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000 21:18:03 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:

>Until recently, it was best to assume that all email and news
>paths were not "8-bit safe".  It's very common to this day for
>gateways to convert all 8-bit chars in email to equivalent
>7-bit "quoted printable" format - no data is lost, the receiving

My gateway does this. A PMMail/2 user with a different problem has a
gateway that does the opposite: converts quoted printable to 8bit! No
kidding.

>email s/w has to be able to decode the 7-bit quoted printable
>stuff to normal 8-bit!
>
>BTW: Quoted printable uses "=9F" without the quotes (so 3 7-bit chars)
>     to indicate the single 8 bit char value 9F hex 

This is not the point. These people are *NOT* using quoted printable
characters. The email in question was *not* "autoconverted" by a
gateway (at least, I don't think there was any such header line added
by such a gateway). Quite simply they used 8bit characters but their
mail list software used the header line "Content-Transfer-Encoding:
7bit".

Then they basically said, "this message shows up properly on most
people's (i.e., everyone using Windows with Windows' charsets)
computer, accents and all so go screw yourself. We don't care if the
encoding/headers are conflicting, break standards and cause mailers
on other platforms to display improperly."

I think. That's why I asked for further advice before I told them
they were full of it. And by "it", I mean "shit".


-- 
 Trevor Smith          |          trevor@haligonian.com
 PGP public key available at: www.haligonian.com/trevor