On Sun Jan 05 1997, Jim Osborn wrote to
procmail(_at_)informatik(_dot_)rwth-aachen(_dot_)de:
I'm trying to track down the source of nonsense characters, trailing
equal signs, equal-three-D, etc., that appear when mail is sent
from Microsoft mailers (Exchange, Message, etc.) to Unix mailers.
I don't think it's an RTF issue, but something else.
Absolutely horrible, isn't it?
It's called Quoted-Printable, and such messages should have the header
line:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Quoted-Printable
Can someone point me to an appropriate newsgroup/list, or correspond
privately with me about this? It doesn't seem to be strictly a MS
issue, or a Unix issue, but an incompatibliity between the two.
It's standard email mime encoding for transferring messages with 8bit
characters as 7bit encoded, as well as for message formatting
purposes.
There is an RFC for it (well, not an RFC totally devoted to it, but
its format is specified in one of the RFCs concerned with MIME).
It's not restricted to m$crud or even unix. It's just that m$ seems
to think that QP is the ant's pants and by default their applications
tend to use it all the time. Zmailer also QP's email if it finds 8bit
characters in messages but the other MTA does not identify the ability
to specificaly handle 8bit.
Ultimately, I can use procmail to clean the crud up, but I'd rather
be able to point my finger intelligently at the real problem.
Just get yourself a mime-compliant mail reader, or filter your mail
through a program that will do the conversions for you.
There's a program called `emil' that can do this (and much more
besides)...
ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/emil-2.1.0-beta9.tar.gz
http://www.uu.se/emil/
This is the procmail recipe I use for such messages...
# --- do mime filtering if it is Quoted-Printable ---
#
# QUOTED-PRINTABLE -> 8bit
#
:0fW
* ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: Quoted-Printable
| emil -u -C ISO-8859-1 -F RFC822 -H 8bit -T 8bit
:0 Afhw
| formail -I "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit" \
-I "X-Converted: Quoted-Printable to 8bit"
Cheers
Tony