This is another of several recent messages that displays as total
garbage to me (Thunderbird 6.0.2 on Fedora 15). Anyone have any idea
what is going on here? This looks to me like the email I am receiving
is ill-formed. Using "view source" I can see that the main message body
is formatted with content
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
and what immediately follows those headers does appear to be legit
base64 down to a point. Feeding just those initial lines into web
base64 translators gives valid results:
"how about *SI*, Subsystem Instance? ... (etc. including some
characters that definitely require UTF-8)
But immediately on the next line following this valid base64 content is:
--bcaec547ca51d8417704aeadc3a4
DQotLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0t
LS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tDQpGb3IgSUJNLU1BSU4gc3Vic2NyaWJlIC8gc2lnbm9mZiAvIGFyY2hp
dmUgYWNjZXNzIGluc3RydWN0aW9ucywNCnNlbmQgZW1haWwgdG8gbGlzdHNlcnZAYmFtYS51YS5l
ZHUgd2l0aCB0aGUgbWVzc2FnZTogR0VUIElCTS1NQUlOIElORk8NClNlYXJjaCB0aGUgYXJjaGl2
ZXMgYXQgaHR0cDovL2JhbWEudWEuZWR1L2FyY2hpdmVzL2libS1tYWluLmh0bWwNCg==
which looks like a multi-part Email separator (there were no earlier
multi-part headers to make this legit), followed by more base64 content
minus the required Content headers. Interestingly enough the final
encoded piece when manually decoded appears to be the ibm-main footer:
"----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html";
Is this problem possibly being caused by some people sending multi-part
MIME email to the list and totally confusing the list server which
doesn't allow multi-part? Or is there some bug in the list server's way
of appending the list footer when the post is base64 encoded? Or, is
this just another nasty side effect of sending email through down-level
email clients or servers that still after all these years fail to
properly support 8-bit email and force auto-conversion to base64
encoding at some point during the transmission?
JC Ewing
On 10/06/2011 11:20 PM, Cobe Xu wrote:
��z{S���}�ĝ� �xjǺ�*'���O*^��m��Z�w!j� �Ɔ�r&�WB�4���7V'7�7FV���7F�6S�#��R
y-y=y�
y y�
...
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
