Subject Lines and Windows-1252 [Was: Re: A petition to ...]

Well, look at the characters that got encoded: See that =92? 0x92 is not within the ASCII range. Based on the way it's used, I suspect it is some kind of apostropheish character in 1252. (Indeed, I my mailer regularly sees mail marked as being 8859-1 with such octets in it; it's not a valid 8859-1 printable either. Most of those I manage to reject automatically.) Not much justification at the human layer, but quite enough at the software layer - the software is not in a position to tell when "visitor's" is a suitable substitute for that "visitor?s" (for whatever value of ?) in the subject. And far too many people are unwilling (or unable) to make sure they don't perpetrate such horrors accidentally. It is. There are times when I think the cure is worse than the disease in this case. (Most of the time I come down on the other side. But, occasionally....) As for the "incomprehensibly garbled" one, if you mean the one I quoted at the very top of this mail,that was using ?B? rather than ?Q?, meaning you need to use base64 to instead of quoted-printable to get the (presumably-)intended octet string out. In a sense, in that that is under some conditions the least-effort way to shut up the uglification. It's not much of an option to me, of course, but the people who choose (by choice of MUA) to generate it seem to think there's nothing wrong with it. I exert a minor pressure against it by calling them on it intermittently and, in list cases, not too infrequently skipping a message if it has too many of the various things like this that make it harder to read. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B