[Mailman-Users] "="s in message

[John W Baxter]

At 12:16 -0500 3/25/2002, Mark T. Valites wrote:
>One of my list admins just sent an email to her list, and the mail sent
>out appended "=" to the end of each line, and a "=20" to the end of the
>message.  She was using outlook express as her email client.
>
>I've never seen this before.  The equal sign character didn't raise any
>flags to me right away either.  Ideas?
>
>Since hiding the school is kinda pointless, the message can be seen in
>the archives at:

This is quoted-printable at work.  The bare = is needed at the end of a
soft-wrapped quoted printable line if there would otherwise be a space or
tab there.  (Below)

The =20 is a space...in general =hh is the character whose code in some
relevant code table is hh.

(Windows) Outlook Express can be tamed in this regard by changing the
Encoding setting in HTML Settings and/or Plain Text Settings to something
other than Quoted printable.  (None is likely better; Base 64 is probably
not a good idea for sending to Mailman lists.)

For most mailing lists, your sender might consider an account sent to Plain
Text sending only, with encoding None.  Tools-->Options-->Send:  The Mail
Sending Format portion.

   ========
>From RFC 1521:

Rule #3 (White Space): Octets with values of 9 and 32 MAY be represented as
ASCII TAB (HT) and SPACE characters, respectively, but MUST NOT be so
represented at the end of an encoded line. Any TAB (HT) or SPACE characters
on an encoded line MUST thus be followed on that line by a printable
character. In particular, an "=" at the end of an encoded line, indicating
a soft line break (see rule #5) may follow one or more TAB (HT) or SPACE
characters. ...
-- 
John Baxter   jwblist at olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA