25 Nov
2018
25 Nov
'18
3:32 p.m.
Most mail servers sending inbound messages to the list include the encoding
scheme in the header. The mailer program should process and translate the
email message body accordingly...in theory anyway. The set up and testing
of a sampling of encoding variations would reveal which interpreters were
missing in our particular list's relay process. Someone could create tests
with the most common 20 or so encoding schemes and a character set dump and
document the results etc. Anyone have the time for that? I dont really
think asking persons to fix their email program is the solution, it's a
mailing list fix/enhancement. I bet there is documentation on such a
procedure I can't imagine we are the first to encounter this problem. It's
fixable
B
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018, 3:24 PM Frank McConnell via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
Very old mail programs indeed have no understanding
whatsoever of
character sets or encoding. They simply display data from the e-mail file
on stdout or equivalent. If you are lucky, the character set and encoding
in the e-mail match the character set and encoding used by your terminal.
The early-to-mid-1990s MIME work was in some part about allowing e-mail to
indicate its character set and encoding, because at that point in time
there were many character sets and multiple encodings. Before that, you
had to figure them out from your correspondent's e-mail address and the
mess on your screen or printout.
And really it's not just about the mail program, it's about the host
operating system and the hardware on which it runs and which you are using
to view e-mail. Heavy-metal characters are likely to look funny on a
terminal built to display US-ASCII like an HP 2645. Your chances get
better if the software has enough understanding of various Roman-language
text encodings and you are using an HP 2622 with HP-ROMAN8 character
support and the connection between your host and terminal is
eight-bit-clean. But then you get something that uses Cyrillic and now
you're looking at having another HP 2645 set up to do Russian. And hoping
your host software knows how to deal with those character sets and
encodings too!
-Frank McConnell
On Nov 25, 2018, at 9:55, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
kelly
seems only the very old mail programs do not adapt to all character
sets?
In a message dated 11/25/2018 6:19:52 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk at
classiccmp.org writes:
> On Nov 21, 2018, at 4:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 11/21/18 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Ed,
It is YOUR mail program that is doing the extraneous insertions, and
then not showing them to you when you view your own messages.
ALL of us see either extraneous characters, or extraneous spaces in
everything that you send!
I use PINE in a shell account, and they show up as a whole bunch of
inappropriate spaces.
Seriously, YOUR mail program is inserting extraneous stuff.
Everybody? but you sees it.
I don't. I didn't see it until someone replied with a
copy of the offending text included.
bill