On Nov 2, 15:36, Robert Wittig wrote: sequences Er, yes, IIRC it was the same person :-) codes. Is I the No, it's John's mail client. It's not just the quotes or whatever is being used to indent the quoted text. It's anything that isn't flat 7-bit ASCII, with some characters reserved to allow encoding. For example, the line Institute+AF8AIg- contains 4 different escape sequences, one of which is 8 characters long! UTF-7 is a coding system designed to handle Unicode (which is normally 16-bit or 20-bit) by using escape sequences to encode non-ASCII characters in a way similar to the scheme base64 uses for whole chunks, and intended only for use on 7-bit systems that can't handle 8-bit data. John is problem. The text appears with the wierd escape sequences on loads of MUAs, in fact probably most of them. Very few MUAs support UTF-7, because it has inefficient compression, there are other encodings that are more versatile, it's more awkward than most to program, and it's a one-to-many transform (for any given string, there are several possible encodings) so it produces unsearchable text. And since it came along later than the other common encoding schemes, and doesn't do anything the others can't, I suppose there was an element of "why bother?" If you look up Unicode and UTF-8, you'll find dozens of common applications that support it (and UTF-8 is the accepted standard for a whole load of things defined in RFCs, as well as the mail internationalization report UTF-7 is Outlook. Quote from the IMC report: "Fortunately, very few vendors implemented UTF-7, and its use is strongly discouraged in Internet mail." The solution is to turn off the UTF-7 character set, use ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 or something else that's commonly accepted, and then use a standard content-transfer encoding, like quoted-printable or base64 if you have to make it 7-bit-safe. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York