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Re: Weird quoted-printable messages from Outlook



On 2006-01-24 11:12:33 +0100, Phil Pennock wrote:

> And there's the " =" at the end of the lines inside a
> paragraph.  This is format=flowed text, see RFC 2646.  That
> RFC also states a policy of "SHOULD NOT" be used with
> quoted-printable, though:

Sorry, no.  A "=" at the end of a line simply means that the
line break that follows is to be ignored.  It has nothing at
all to do with format=flowed -- a format=flowed processor won't
even see these soft line breaks.

Example:

| this =
| is =
| one =
| line

format=flowed uses trailing white space to indicate its own
version of soft line breaks, with different semantics.  This
trailing white space normally ends up as a trailing "=20" when
you look at quoted-printable encoded material.

Another example:

| this is one line =20
| that may be flowed together =20
| with the next one =
| but note that this just continues after "one"


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

> Missing format=flowed and is misusing the CTE; however in fairness I
> should point out that RFC2646 was written "after the fact" in 1999, but
> it was written to address the sorts of maverick incompatibilities
> introduced by a certain vendor's email products.

Well, you could argue whether or not the content is supposed to
be rendered as format=flowed.  One can also argue whether or
not clients have to re-flow text, or not.  (I'm inclined to say
they shouldn't re-flow text unless they really need to.)

I'd really say that this is just Outlook-generated plain text
messages sucking badly.


-- 
Thomas Roessler · Personal soap box at <http://log.does-not-exist.org/>.