[Dragaera] The Jenoine and humans elsewhere

[Michael Wojcik]

Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> Scott:
> 
> Please please please do not post non-ASCII text.  I have just
> received two screenfuls of STUFF that looks like 
> 
> cmFnYWVyYS5pbmZv
> 
> only a lot more of it.  You might have had something really
> interesting to say, but I'll never know.

It appears that Scott's MUA, Outlook Express, is sending messages in
UTF-8, encoded in Base64. (That is, content-encoding is utf-8, and
content-transfer-encoding is Base64.)

Some MTAs (mail servers) will convert Base64-transfer-encoded messages
back to their content encodings before delivering them to you. Failing
that, many MUAs (mail clients) will decode Base64-encoded message
bodies for you.

It appears that Dorothy's MTA and MUA do not.

If Scott, or anyone else who might be sending Base64-transfer-encoded
messages, wants to correct this, there are various hint pages on the
web that describe how to set the appropriate options for various MUAs
to get them to send plain-text messages. For example:

	http://www.expita.com/nomime.html#outlook5

describes a procedure for Outlook Distress 5.x and 6.x.

I haven't tried it, but I think it might suffice to simply find the
"Encode text using" option and set it to "none", though this might
cause minor problems with abominations such as "smart quotes".

-- 
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University