Re: [tlug] Selective mojibake email

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Glenn" == Glenn Evanish <glenn@example.com> writes:

    Glenn> When I go to read the same or similar test email with other
    Glenn> OSs and browsers, though, I get mojibake.

Well, that's what I got with your mail to TLUG, but it's probably my
configuration problem, because when I explicitly converted the raw
codes I was seeing to utf-8 it read fine, and there is an appropriate
Content-Type header.  (Although the fact that Norman got it too makes
me wonder.)  But in my experience with sender-induced mojibake, if it
didn't come from niftyserve.com, it had something like (as taken from
your headers :-)

    X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4807.1700
    X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4807.1700
    Subject: [tlug] Selective mojibake email

in it.

The fact is that Microsoft does not properly implement standards that
it doesn't control, nor even its own.  For example, for at least a
year after the introduction of the Euro, Microsoft software inserted a
Euro sign code into Windows 125x documents, although there was no Euro
sign in the registered descriptions of those character sets (and I
believe still is not, to this day).  I also recall getting several
mails with content-type of text/plain, no charset, whose bodies
started with the swabbed Unicode BOM and proceeded to have text in
Microsoft Unicode (which is non-conformant, real Unicode is big-endian)
but HTML markup in ASCII!  That was a beta version of Outhouse Abcess
for Windows 2000, so presumably they fixed it in released software,
but I saw that from several sites so the broken version was fairly
widely distributed.

And Shift JIS is a mess, anyway.  It's not ISO 2022 clean, so you have
to be careful that anything you run it through is 8-bit squeaky-clean.
Since ISO 2022 can use C1 control codes, a poor implementation might
do something weird with Shift JIS.

Moral: if you're going to send from a Microsoft platform, make sure
the audience is on a Microsoft platform, or you are going to get
embarrassed.

    Glenn> Or who I should be asking?

The vendor of the problem platform.  Microsoft.  :-(

-- 
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