> In answer to a couple questions, I'm using Eudora Pro 3 for the Mac, and I=
> have tried turning off word wrap before posting. When I originally posted=
> my question, it looked like I'd put the word Newsgroups: on a line by=
> itself, but this is not the way I typed it in. Any ideas?
This is almost as frequently asked a question as "What tools can I use
to convert HTML to text / text to HTML / foo to bar?"
Turning word wrap off may not be sufficient. Eudora is encoding your
text before it is transmitted on the network, as evidenced by these
headers in the email which you sent to faq-maintainers@consensus.com.
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Personally, I find MIME to be a pain in the butt. I have nothing
against MIME encodings for binary data; but 99.9% of the time that I
see text that has been encoded as "quoted-printable", the text when
decoded back into plain old ASCII could have been viewed, printed,
etc., by the vast majority of people and software with no problem.
Your Newsgroups: line as mailed to faq-server@rtfm.mit.edu is supposed
to be all on one line (the Newsgroups: line, unlike most other header
lines, cannot be continued onto multiple lines). However, when Eudora
encodes it as 'quoted-printable', and it probably does so whenever
there are lines like your Newsgroups: line that exceed 80 characters,
it splits up the line into multiple lines.
[From experience, quoted-printable encoding consists of taking lines
which are considered "too long" and inserting "=<EOL>" (equal sign
character, followed by whatever is the correct end of line character
sequence for the platform) every so often until the resulting lines
are deemed "short enough". In addition, ASCII characters which have
even the slightest chance of being mutilated in transit are translated
to "=XY" (equal sign character, followed by a two-digit hexadecimal
representation of the character being encoded). Lastly, if the equal
sign character appears in the original text, it is encoded the same
way (as "=3D").]
I'm beginning to think that the right solution here may be to add a
bit of code to faq-server@rtfm.mit.edu scripts to explicitly detect
the header indicating "quoted-printable" MIME encoding and running the
body of the email through "mmencode -q -u" or equivalent (program to
decode "quoted-printable" encoding), rather than to have to keep
telling FAQ maintainers to turn off "quoted-printable" in their mail
readers when they submit their postings to faq-server.
-- Ping Huang <pshuang@mit.edu>; more info: http://web.mit.edu/pshuang/.plan Disclaimer: unless explicitly otherwise stated, my statements represent my personal viewpoints only.