Re: [exim] Weird Characters

eximmail wrote:
> I have started seeing these weird characters in a couple of emails. On
> this list anything W B Hacker sends I can't read his mail at all! I have
> to go to the board to read them. This just started in the last week or
> so and I am at a loss as to why it is happening at all. This also
> happened on an online purchase and every email they sent me was the same
> weird characters.
>
>
> can anyone explain why this is happening?
>
>

I'll try...

Most reasonably modern MUA, and nearly all that are 'browser derived',
such as Thundermug or the Seamonkey MUA, detect the character encoding.

If not from the message's MIME-type, (or a web-page's tags) then by one
form or another of 'auto' means. Browsers are fairly good at that last
part. MOST also have a menu option to 'steer' what they should look for
on auto, and to force a choice when you must.

My messages are near-as-dammit ALWAYS sent in UTF-8 body, and the use of
my Chinese name is primarily to make sure of that. Further, as the basic
characters used in USASCII and those in UTF-8 are compatible, you should
see NO munging EXCEPT on the Chinese name characters.

That, too is deliberate. So unless my posts pop back into plain English
with a tweak of your 'View, Character encoding' (or equivalant) options
- first glance sez your MUA is a quart low.

but ..

Nothing is simple, let alone perfect.

And IF/AS/WHEN there is one or more intervening conversions, they can
get 'less perfect' Real Soon Now.

Aside from transiting an MTA that doesn't preserve such encoding,
cutting and pasting, or using a quoted reply, as you have herein, will
quite often break the ability to recover to original encoding - even if
you know what it was and 'force' your MUA into that.

Further complicating the issue is that over the past few months, it
appears that several browsers and MUA have apparently seen 'updates' to
themselves - or to libs and infrastructure - that has damaged previously
proper behaviour. That part is just my own guess, but we are seeing it
in many places.

Example: My plaintext display in SeaMonkey MUA - rock solid for many
years - has now gone unpredictable as to what FONT any given arrival may
display in. That MAY be a result of changes in how WinLusers send, as
it seems to show up most consistently on their traffic.

Sorry I don't have a 'fix' for it - but it does seem to be a widespread
problem that just recently took a turn for the worse, so I am sure it is
being looked into by those who CAN fix it

Regards,

Bill Hacker
--
韓家標