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Re: CHAT: Corrupt messages (was CHAT: Doug Ball, PhD)

From:Lars Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
Date:Monday, December 15, 2008, 13:03
2008/12/15 Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 00:44, David McCann <david@...> > wrote: > > I get my CONLANG messages in a daily digest. If the problem doesn't > > occur with individual emails, it could be that the server at Brown is > > just taking the individual emails, each with its own encoding, and > > sticking them together. > > Ah, that could well be the case -- that the list server isn't 'clever' > enough to re-encode all messages into one consistent encoding.
We had the same discussion a little less than three months ago, where David McCann was stumped by base64 in his digest. I still haven't checked for myself how a digest actually looks at the MIME level, but I think you're right. With the open source MIME support libraries available these days, it would be a SMOP to make a digest where all the mails are converted to Unicode and encoded in utf8/base64 -- and there can't be many mail clients left that won't handle that.
> In that case, naturally my software will assume > > that the same encoding occurs throughout. > > Quite a reasonable assumption, and indeed, the only possible one, > since you can't just put a new email 'header' (announcing a new > Content-Transfer-Encoding or charset, for example) into the middle of > the email's body. (Unless you use MIME multipart digests.)
Like the multipart/digest MIME type, for instance. It's almost as lightweight as the current digests, and just as human readable even if the mail reader has no support. -- Lars

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>