On Tue, Apr 07, 2026 at 09:01:15PM -0500, Greg Marks wrote:
Following the discussion here:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38324093/php-html-email-equals-sign-in-email-is-being-converted-to-different-characte I attempted to resend the message with the original URL written as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DvDktNSENjUU
The sender on that stackoverflow question was manually creating and sending an email.
In their headers for the HTML part, they said the message contents were: Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printableBut they did not in fact encode that part as quoted-printable. So on the receiving side, the client was trying to decode it as such, even though it wasn't properly encoded, creating the problem.
When using a real MUA, such as mutt, the MUA will take care of choosing and properly encoding the message for you, if needed.
Might the issue be that I send messages as plain text but the recipient's MUA reads them as HTML? Is there some setting in .muttrc that I could adjust to fix this issue from my end?
It's hard to say for sure what's happening, but whatever they are using to read the message is likely the problem. Best course of action is to ask them to report a bug to their MUA, or to their email provider if they use a web interface. Some web interfaces provide a "view raw message" option. It might be interesting to see what that shows where you typed the URL. You could compare it to the message in your $record folder.
You can manually set the encoding of your message using the <edit-encoding> command, by default bound to ctrl-e at the compose menu. You could try typing quoted-printable or even base64 at the prompt and sending the message to see what happens on the recipient's side. But there isn't an easy way to automate this, because a normal user doesn't need to do this.
-- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA
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