Date:         Tue, 5 Jan 2010 22:30:48 -0600
Reply-To:     Mike South <msouth@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Mike South <msouth@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      NVC Re: Characters in Messages...Why?
Comments: To: Madeline <mac10wv@yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Madeline <mac10wv@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Why do some messages come through with characters injected in them...
> characters like A0 or =20
> Drives me nuts trying to read them!
>

Go to:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1521.txt

Search that document for:

Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding

Anything where you have a bunch of =XY where the X and Y are digits
0-9 and letters A-F, you've got a message that got ENcoded into the
"Quoted-printable" encoding but somewhere along the line something
failed to DEcode it from that encoding.

Certain characters are special, like the space character (ascii 32,
which in hexadecimal is 20) and the equals character (ascii 61,
hexadecimal 3D), and MUST be encoded, so if someone typed a string of
= signs to make a line like this:

===============================

The "Quoted-printable" encoding says "change all those to =3D".  It
thinks someone else will then change them back to = signs, and that is
what is supposed to happen, but either a machine between you and them
didn't get it, or some poorly written software ignored the fact that
the mail said it was in "Quoted-printable" encoding, and it left it
encoded.

Sometimes you'll see a lot of lines with = at the end of each line,
that's also part of that encoding.

This is really a Friday topic though :).

mike

I noticed a couple of weeks ago one of my messages appeared.
>
> Madeline
> Milko III
>
>
>
>
>