From: Monterey, Laura CTR (laura.monterey@navy.mil)
Date: Tue Mar 08 2005 - 03:40:13 EST
Thanks for the explanation, Detlef. It's always good to know what's going on. However, because I am short on extra time at work, I typically just delete the emails that come in with the "majordomo" heading, and that probably won't change. I feel bad about possibly missing THE piece of information that I need, but there it is. Thanks again.
Laura Leigh Monterey
Technical Writer, Software Test Support, Lockheed Martin Systems Management
NAWCWD 527220D, 130 Easy Rd, Stop 3009
China Lake, California 93555-6109, (760) 939-6700, DSN 437
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-re-online@it.uts.edu.au
[mailto:owner-re-online@it.uts.edu.au]On Behalf Of Didar Zowghi
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 3:54
To: re-online@it.uts.edu.au
Subject: [re-online] Garbled E-Mail Hints for RE-online
Dear fellow subscribers,
My apologies for this off-topic posting, and I hope my remarks do not unduly bother you with things you perhaps do not care about or know anyway.
About 15 % of all messages we receive here look characteristically strange. You will have noticed that some of the symptoms are that
It seems the reason for this is that those messages were sent with an 8bit character encoding. This may not be illegal, but is, as we have seen, just not save to do. Some e-mail programs (probably including the server software of the machine hosting this mailing list) cannot cope with it and chop one bit off every character, which leads to the garbling you see.
The cure is that you configure your e-mail program to send messages out using 7bit and MIME. The latter setting ensures that characters not contained in the (7bit-)ASCII code are mapped to a sequence of ASCII characters that can be savely transmitted.
Some of the problematic messages came from hotmail and yahoo mail accounts. These services cannot be configured differently, so the only advice can be not to use web based mail.
I have also seen another problem that could effect the appearance of messages even if 7bit MIME was used. Some people here use platform specific character sets that cannot be rendered on all systems. However, that can also be configured in any decent e-mail client. A safe configuration is to use "ISO 8859-1" aka "Latin 1". Not safe is e.g. "Windows-125x" which is, as you might guess, something not necessarily understood on other computers than PCs.
Hopefully this was interesting at least for some of you.
With best regards
Detlef
Detlef Ruschin HHHHHHH HHHHHHH III Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunication, HHHHHHH HHHHHHH III Heinrich-Hertz-Institut HHHHHHH HHHHHHH Dep. Interactive Media - Human Factors HHHHHHH HHHHHHH III Einsteinufer 37 III 10587 Berlin HHHHHHH HHHHHHH III GERMANY HHHHHHH HHHHHHH III Tel. +49 30 310 02 -670 HHHHHHH HHHHHHH III Fax +49 30 310 02 -212 HHHHHHH HHHHHHH III -------------------------------------------------------------------------------To send a message to this mailing list send it to re-online@it.uts.edu.au. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, email majordomo@it.uts.edu.au with the message `unsubscribe re-online' in the BODY of the mail.
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