Re: META: Weird increase of equality signs in emails

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 03:52:27PM +0100, Carsten Becker wrote:

> I'm a bit annoyed that at the moment, there is hardly any
> message these days from the list which does not have at
> least one letter of a word in any paragraph that is not
> randomly replaced by a equality sign for whatever reason.
The equal signs are part of MIME-encoding.  I do not know why your
gmail is not decoding the MIME properly, unless you are seeing this
only in quoted text, in which case the person replying to the original
may not have had a MIME-capable email program and therefore may have
accidentally mangled the MIME-encoding while replying.

> Also bits of mangled HTML appear, like "i>" or "quot=>" ...
> very strange. Is it just GMail mangling that stuff or is it
> the case with other people who do *not* use GMail as well?
I haven't been seeing that.  If mangled MIME codes are interrupting
HTML tags, this could happen.  I agree that people should send
non-HTML mail whenever possible.  I also prefer non-MIME-encoded mail,
since my email reading solution is broken in a different way from yours -
I *cannot* get Mutt to stop substituting "?" for latin-1 letters that
I could read just fine if it would only display them!  When the mail is
sent in Latin-1 without MIME encoding, then I can always view the raw
email source and see the diacritics that way, but if it's MIME-encoded,
then I see equal signs in the raw email source and Mutt presents me
with helpful "?"'s in the MIME-decoded email.  Very annoying.

Amanda

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