[Mailman-Users] illegible message in moderation approval queue

[John Levine]

In article <57E49A8D.1030107 at sgeinc.com> you write:
> From a quick look, it looks like base64 encoding.  Invented back in the 
>dialup/uucp days when transport was not always 8bit clean so things were 
>encoded to make sure only transportable characters were used.

Well, actually, we uucp users used something called uuencode, and base64
was invented for Internet MIME messages in the 1990s.

But if you can forward the message to your mail program, it can probably
decode the base64 and you can see what it is.  Your hint about the
different character set is spot on, that's likely why it's base64 encoded.

R's,
John



>
>On 9/22/2016 9:58 PM, Matt Morgan wrote:
>> I have a message in a moderation queue. It's from a member (everyone is
>> moderated on this list) so I think it's not spam or other junk. But when I
>> click to review it, it's not legible. This is all I see in the message
>> excerpt:
>>
>> IENvbnNkaXNsaXN0DQoNCrOqwMcgaVBob25lv6G8rSC6uLO/
>>
>> I feel like I've seen other messages that look encoded/illegible in
>> moderation, though I don't have other examples right now. What can cause
>> this?
>>
>> For what it's worth, the sender is a speaker of a language that uses a
>> different character set, so if that's possible cause, that might be the
>> reason here.