Re: [OT-LIST] Unsupported character sets

>On Sat, 20 Feb 1999, Los wrote:

>> Be advised the only thing I do to get the umlaut in the email is cut
and post
>> that particular letter into my email, other than that it's no
diffeernt than
>> any other eamil.

>understood. this is all quite interesting (for the technical pedant
such
>as myself, anyway). i had an email broken by a degree sign (coming from
a
>somewhat broken lotus notes), but never by an umlaut.

That was my broken lotus notes (well, my work's anyway) but the text
that
contained the degree symbol was straight fromm Schoon's original posting
on that
section.  His posting already seemed to be RTF (Rich-Text Format) which
seems to
allow the upper-ascii characters.

(for those interested, upper-ascii is NOT actually ascii.  Ascii is a
7-bit
character set, the upper half is undefined, which is why we have all
this
silliness, and PC's especially have had to fiddle with dozens of
upper-ascii
'codepages' to redefine these upper characters.)

Microsoft still supports, and in some respects, even encourages RTF. 
Word
especially is a major culprit.	It seems if you have a plain text
document, then
put in a non-ascii character, it sort of internally converts things to
RTF...or
some such wierdness.

>i have, however, noticed attachments containing duplicate messages.

>> It's not like I'm doing HTML.

>i don't think anyone on this list does. although schoon has posted in
>"text/enriched" once or twice, which is pretty exotic - that's a
>formatted-text format that was defined years ago and obsoleted by HTML
>version one. i'm at a loss to explain it's presence in a modern-day
email.

As noted, it was Schoon's RTF that contained the degree symbol, and in
my
re-reading it, I failed to notice it, or else I would have stripped it
out.
Microsoft still supports, and in some respects, even encourages RTF. 
Word
especially is a major culprit.	It seems if you have a plain text
document, then
put in a non-ascii character, it sort of internally converts things to
RTF...or
some such wierdness.

But still, better RTF mail than HTML mail...geez, that stuff is horrid.

Jared Noble