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