On Saturday, November 2, 2002, Brian Chase wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Nov 2002, Sellam Ismail wrote:
> > John, I can never quite get used to reading your messages with these
> > ridiculous escape codes spread throughout. ... It seems special
> > punctuation characters (brackets, apostrophes, quote marks) are being
> > escaped in some wacky fashion.
>
> I don't think John is aware of it, or can even see the characters as such
> in his mail client.
For those who aren't seeing these: an example is '+ A D 4 -' (plus-sign,
uppercase A, uppercase D, numeral 4, minus sign), without the spaces. That
was used instead of a quoting character.
> From his mail headers one can see that the likely culprit is Outlook:
Well, sort of. The problem is how OE is configured. Look at the character
set:
> -> MIME-Version: 1.0
> -> Content-Type: text/plain;
> -> charset="utf-7"
Those escape sequences are UTF-7 escape sequences. UTF-7 is an encoding that
translates 16-bit Unicode text into 7-bit ASCII text, as defined in RFC2152.
> I'm not sure how one disables the annoying non-standard escape sequences
John needs to change the character set used for outgoing mail. ISO-8859-1
should work fine.
> There's probably some way to disable this, but I'll be damned if I ever
> launch a Microsoft mail client.
Granted, OE isn't the best mail client, but to be fair, this kind of
misconfiguration isn't an OE-specific problem. I'm sure other mail clients
can be set to send UTF-7, and they probably would call it a feature.
--
Jeffrey Sharp
Received on Sat Nov 02 2002 - 18:48:00 GMT