BillW wrote:

>> There's nothing non-ASCII in there. The =B5 is the quoted-printable
>> encoding for that character in the ISO-8859-1 font. This is such a 
>> common standard font that any email software should have at least a 
>> translation table for it. 
 
> Yah, sure.  It showed up consistantly in your email as "equals B 5"

Of course, that's what I typed. Since I didn't use any non-ASCII
characters, my message didn't get encoded as quoted-printable; check out
the headers of my message:

 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Besides, you can type "=B5" ("equals B 5") even in a quoted-printable
message, and it will remain "=B5" ("equals B 5"). But if you write an (8
bit) mu character (not "=B5"), this character will become the real "equals
B 5" (depending on the character set, of course), and the email program
will put the quoted-printable header into the email and the charset
information also, so that the email program on the receiving end knows that
it needs to decode the =B5 and how to display that 8bit character.

That's the standard, and that's how most email clients work. Mine here for
example sends out plain 7-bit ASCII messages if there's no 8-bit character,
and if I use one, it puts the character set and quoted-printable encoding
in the header. (This message, as far as I can see, should go out as ASCII.
There are other messages of mine that contain 8bit characters, and they all
have the appropriate headers that tell an email client how to decode and
display it -- according to the appropriate email standards.)

> 8bit characters are not in ascii, and not promised to make it through
> smtp or other mail programs...

That's what quoted-printable (and other encodings) are there for. An 8-bit
text encoded in quoted-printable only contains ASCII characters. All
non-ASCII characters are encoded, like in "=B5" ("equals B 5"). This is
guaranteed to make it through every smtp channel.

I'm not sure what the problem is. What I know, though, is that in places
where non-ASCII characters are the norm (most non-English speaking
countries; that is, among others, most of Europe and South America), there
is no problem writing and receiving emails with characters with accents or
such. The standards for that are there, and the programs that work
according to those standards are there, too. If they can make it work, the
US probably would be up to it, too... :)

The standard I'm referring to is RFC 1521:
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1521.html


It seems there may be some header clowns in the loop in this mailing list,
though, that modify the email headers -- at least this is what Howard says
(his email coming back to him from the list having different headers than
the email he sends out). If this is true, this is not nice.

Gerhard
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