Archive Garble

[Andrew Rudoff]

> Can anyone tell me why half the posts archived are cluttered with  " = 
> 20 " and other such garbel  written every other line or so. Causes a lot 
> of distraction when trying read through posts.  Take the following clip 
> from a random post.....

Many mail programs use a method of "encoding" outgoing mail messages
to protect things like space and newline characters by encoding them as an
equals sign and then two hex numbers (like =20).  Such mail messages are
marked with a header at the top like this:

	Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

and when your mail reader shows you the message, it knows to convert those
sequences back so you don't have to see them.  Their usage is very wide-spread
but mostly hidden by your mail reader so you don't usually notice them.

The problem is that when messages are concatenated together, like the
digests, or when they are converted to HTML pages, like the archives, the
conversion software doesn't always correctly detect the "quoted-printable"
encodings and convert them back.  This is a bug in the Mailman freeware
program we use for our mailing lists and archives.

The bug may well be fixed, though.  Our version of Mailman is a bit downrev.
Upgrading our copy of Mailman is already on my (fairly long) list of things
to do, so hopefully that will help fix this problem (if not, I can add fixing
it to the end of my long list :-)

-andy