[lit-ideas] Re: One more try
- From: Teemu Pyyluoma <teme17@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:03:59 -0800 (PST)
Robert, your latest mail looks OK. To make a long
story short, I don't think the problem is with
freelists but with Outlook, which I guess you are
using. If it happens again, try the following (for
Outlook 2003):
1. Click Tools, click Options, then click the Mail
Format tab.
2. In the Message format section, click International
Options.
3. In the drop-down list for Preferred encoding for
outgoing messages, select US-ASCII.
"ASCII and ye shall receive" is a good rule of thumb
in general.
The "stripped binary" message is because you are
trying send .rtf attachment, I don't have exact guide
on how to disable it but there should a check box in
the Mail Format tab.
The long version blow, for further how to, I am hoping
at least Andreas to comment on this.
What I think is happening here, is that the mail
Robert sent is encoded as something called
"quoted-printable" ASCII. In the following line:
There=20are=20apparent=20exceptions:=20it=20might=20be=20mistakenly=
"=20" is a hexadecimal code, meaning character that
has decimal value 32 in ASCII, that is space, The "="
at the end of line is a soft line break. In
"quoted-printable" character "h" for example is coded
as 55 or 0011 0111, but for reasons arcane values
below 33 are first encoded as =[HEX ASCII value] in
text and then encoded to ASCII. For example "h " in
normal ASCII
is 55 32
or 0011 0111 0010 0000
But in quoted-printable you first encode "h "
in to "h=20" and THEN do the ASCII encoding
which leads to 55 61 50 48 (61="=", 50="2", 48="0")
or 0011 0111 0011 1101 0011 0010 0011 0000
which as you can see is a completely different thing.
Now for the program in the other end to do the
decoding succesfully, it ofcourse has to now that
incoming text is quoted-printable, which I think the
encoding program is supposed to write in the mail
header Content-Transfer-Encoding. However for some
reason, in Robert's mail it doesn't say
"quoted-printable" but "8-bit". (What that does mean I
leave as a googling exercise to reader.) And thus for
instance the program that converts mails to HTML used
in Freelists archives doesn't decode the message
properly, as shown in
//www.freelists.org/archives/lit-ideas/01-2005/msg00350.html
So the finger (unsuprisingly) points at Outlook, which
I believe is the mail client Robert is using. Now
fellow Outlookers may operate by the same logic (I am
still not quite sure whether what Outlook is doing is
wrong or just weird) but the rest of the Net has
trouble understanding it.
Unlike most other mail programs, Outlook chooces
automaticly the format for outgoing messages. The
logic as such is pretty sound, if the post has only
standard ASCII letters (A-Z, 2, _, [...) it is sent
out in ASCII. If there are umlauts, or scandinavian
characters (ä, ö, å) "Western European (ISO)" (that is
ISO-8859-1, or Latin-1, the de facto standard
nowadays) character set is used. And so on up to
Unicode, which displays pretty much all known
characters, Klingon most propably included. (Source:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/office/2003/all/reskit/en-us/outb09.mspx)
So if you write "Goethe" Outlook sends it in ASCII,
while if you write "Göethe" it sends ISO-8859-1. This
also has a subtle side-effect that character sets are
inherited, if you quote a mail with string "Göethe" it
gets sent out in ISO-8859-1 even if you don't use any
special characters. You can, well propably can
depending on version you have either force Outlook to
send ASCII by disabling Auto-select encoding (see
above) and then selectin ASCII as default format,
and/or in the older version I have installed (if not
in use) select Plain Text setting to be None.
Why Robert Paul's first mail showed OK and the other
didn't, I don't know. The only difference between them
if you look at the headers is that "Content-type" in
the first is "text/plain" while in the garbled one it
is "text/plain: charset=iso-8859-1". The only
explanation I can think of is that Robert somehow
typed some special character, erased it, and Outlook
somehow choked on that.
Totally irrelevant, but rosencrantz.reed.edu is so
good a server name that I'll have to steal it.
Cheers,
Teemu
Helsinki, Finland
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