On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 09:19:47AM -0800, Cyndi Norman wrote:
>
> If only it were true. A good number of the mailers that send "plain text"
> along with the HTML version really send mangled text. Usually they add an
> "=" at the end of every line and put in some slash-numbers instead of
> special characters. I've seen long threads on some lists about why that is
> the case but I've never seen anyone change their mailer's options.
> Sometimes the "plain text" is so incredibly mangled that it's barely
> legible but the users (if they even see the mess) rarely make the
> connection of "oh, *I* did that" even if they know it intellectually.
This is `quoted-printable' encoding (colloquially called
`quoted-unreadable' for good reason) and is probably not under the
users' control. If they are sending a multipart/alternative
document, the mailer will encode the individual parts with
quoted-printable if they have high-bit characters or long lines,
or maybe just for the hell of it.
The good news is that recipients who have a MIME-aware mailer
should only get decoded versions of the text without all the
silly markup.
--
Regards,
Tim Pierce
RootsWeb.com lead system admonsterator
and Chief Hacking Officer
