Re: The Rose is back and the =20 thingys

[Mark Schuldenfrei <schuldy@abel.MATH.HARVARD.EDU>]

  Although I do have cats that occasionally perch on my shoulder, they are not
  the cause of the =3D20 etc.  I checked the copy I sent out and the copy I
  received back from the Rose and neither copy had =3D20s or =3Danything else.
  Sounds like a goofy gateway somewhere.

The issue is something called MIME, and it's implementation.

The standard size for a character in machine memory is 8 bits: but for
e-mail systems (for good reasons that date back many years) e-mail characters
are only supposed to use the least significant 7 bits.

Extensions to email have been made (called MIME) that allow encoding of all
sorts of characters and data.  But MIME is new, and not ubiquitous.  Mail
readers that speak MIME (hah) can encrypt and decrypt fancy characters,
fonts, programs, and so forth.  (Most of the time.)

If you write your mail with a MIME compliant mailer, then when you read it,
you see nothing.  But when folks without a MIME mailer read it, they see all
sorts of crud.  Including those end of line markers that appear as =20, and
so forth.

If you wish to be kind to those that do not have MIME systems, you will use
the options on your mail reader to turn MIME encoding off when posting to
mailing lists.

	Tibor (Drastically oversimplified)
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