Weird quoted-printable messages from Outlook

[Gary Johnson <garyjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I realize this a mutt-users' list, not an Outlook-users' list, but I 
thought I might find someone here knowledgeable about Outlook 
oddities and how to fix or work around them.

I've been receiving a lot of messages from Outlook users in the last 
year or so that contain extra blank lines.  For example, the 
greeting is separated from the first paragraph by three blank lines 
instead of the usual one; paragraphs are separated from each other 
by three blank lines instead of one; signature blocks are double-
spaced rather than single-spaced.

The MIME structure of the all the messages is like this example from 
mutt's attachment menu.

  I     1 <no description>              [multipa/alternativ, 7bit, 9.3K]
  I     2 |-><no description>       [text/plain, quoted, us-ascii, 2.0K]
  I     3 `-><no description>        [text/html, quoted, us-ascii, 7.0K]

Looking at the quoted-printable-encoded text/plain part (which I
have set mutt to display by default) shows that each blank line
intentionally inserted by the writer is represented by a line
containing only "=20" and that every newline intentionally inserted
by the writer is followed by an extra newline.  So for example, a
letter typed like this (where the paragraph was typed as one long
line):

    Hi,

    This is a paragraph of text that doesn't mean anything but
    just occupies space for this example.

    Regards,
    Fred

appears encoded in the text/plain part of the message body like 
this:

    ------_=_NextPart_001_01C6130A.C7998636
    Content-Type: text/plain;
            charset="us-ascii"
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

    Hi,

    =20

    This is a paragraph of text that doesn't mean anything =
    but just occupies space for this example.

    =20

    Regards,

    Fred


    ------_=_NextPart_001_01C6130A.C7998636

and is displayed by mutt's pager like this:

    Hi,



    This is a paragraph of text that doesn't mean anything but just
    occupies space for this example.



    Regards,

    Fred

This is getting increasingly annoying, in part because the writers
often copy single-spaced text into their messages which I see as
double-spaced, which is harder to read and sometimes requires paging
back and for forth to see the entire message.

Not all messages from Outlook users have this problem, so I suspect
that it is controlled by some configurable setting.  Does anyone
know what the Outlook users could change to fix this?  I can
influence some of them.  Alternatively, is there a way for mutt to
recognize this broken coding and fix it?

My thought so far is to write a display_filter that looks for the
pattern "\n\n \n\n" and if found, replaces all "\n\n" with "\n" in
the message (except for the "\n\n" following the header).

Any other thoughts?

Thanks,
Gary

-- 
Gary Johnson                               | Agilent Technologies
garyjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                   | Wireless Division
http://www.spocom.com/users/gjohnson/mutt/ | Spokane, Washington, USA