e-mail, character sets, encodings (was Re: George Keremedjiev)

[Bill Gunshannon]

It's not a mailing list problem.  It's not even a mail problem. It's a

Mail User Agent problem.  It is a display problem.  It is up to the

users mail program to display the email as it was sent.  Unless the

user doesn't want to see anything in character sets other than

their favorite.  Nothing along the way should change anything

in an email message.  The endpoint should receive whatever the

beginning point sent out and either handle it or not.  But it is the

endpoints responsibility to try to display it accurately.  I often

send emails (and post on USENET) characters that are not a part

of ASCII or the English alphabet.  I certainly don't want someone

in between to modify what I send.


bill


On 11/25/18 7:00 PM, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote:
> Hi  Frank  and  others-
> Yea it  is  only here   we  have  the  problem. or  at leased this is the only  list  serve that  does not  like  it.
>   
> I  wondered if  something  could be handled at the listserv  end  or  not  but I have littleknowledge of list serves alas...
>   
> Sad  when people   spent  more   time  on characters  rather than  George the   museum archivist that passed away.
>
>   
> George  worked his  ass off to achieve what  he  did.
>   
> Google him  and  read  about  his  early days. You will be  surprised and  you might   find yourself  thankful  for  how easy  you  had  it.
>   
> I did not  know  him  all that  well  but I did  provide his  PDP-8  classic  with the  plexis  when He was  first starting up It  was a  beauty and in the 200 serial number  range as  I  remember. We kept  #18 classic  Plexi for  SMECC
>   
> I  had  not  planned on selling it  as   always  handy to have a  #2  for an offsite display and you do not have to disturb the in-house  display but George seems  so  focused and  intense on  making a  museum  too  so  who  could  say no to that? I  wish I  had.  traveled to  see his  effort  up  close.
>   
> Project this  week is  to  find  someone  one  with a UNIVAC  422 or   the predecessor  UNIVAC Digital trainer.  I can NOT BELIEVE I am fortunate enough  to be the only one   with a UNIVAC  422'
>   
> That is all for now...  I  think  I  hear   a half of  turkey and leftover dressing in the refrig  wailing to  be consumed.
>   
> Ed#  www.smecc.org
>   
>   
>   
> In a message dated 11/25/2018 4:32:34 PM US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk at classiccmp.org writes:
>
>   
> 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:
>>> 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
>>>>
>>> same here. i didnt see them until some replies included the text.
>>>
>>> kelly
>>>
>>