quoted-printable

[Marc Sira]

On 26 avr. 2004, at 17:09, Duo/2400 List wrote:

> Yes, I see that happen all the time in here. Never heard a
> good reason why. Is that an Outlook thing? Every time
> somebody hits Return, I see "=20" or "=A9"...

This is what you'll see when a message was sent in MIME 
quoted-printable encoding, where "special" characters are instead sent 
as an equals sign followed by their ASCII value in hexadecimal. It's 
not specifically an Outlook thing, but you will see it from Outlook 
because it uses that encoding by default, even when there's no need (no 
funky characters in the message). Smarter clients like Eudora or 
Mail.app (probably) have a default setting to only use it when 
necessary to preserve things like high-ASCII characters (Latin-1 
diacritics for instance).

There are two reasons you'll see the encoding instead of the intended 
message. The first is if your mail client doesn't support 
quoted-printable, or it or the sending client doesn't support it 
properly. Most modern ones do.

The second reason, which affects many people on this list, is that the 
list digestificator doesn't support quoted-printable encoding, and thus 
mungs any message encoded that way. URLs are particularly badly 
affected because they often contain characters that will be quoted.

Most lists have this problem, and many old clients still out there 
don't support quoted-printable, so by all means TURN IT OFF unless you 
know you need it - send messages in plain text. That's assuming Outlook 
even lets you do that nowadays (I guess we should be thankful we're not 
getting HTML ;).

--
Marc Sira 		| 	toh at victoria.tc.ca
If you can't play with words, what good are they?