spurious characters in cvs-all subject

[Larry Sica]

On Sunday, March 30, 2003, at 10:15 PM, Andrew Boothman wrote:

> Dan Langille wrote:
>
>>>> Anyone else notice the spurious characters in the subject of at
>>>> least a couple of commits today (around 13:35:20 PST)? They appear
>>>> to have stopped. -- Dan Langille : http://www.langille.org/
>>>>
>>> What did they look like?
>>>
>>
>> A square box after right after "cvs commit:".  I saw it in this 
>> message:
>>
>> http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=130598+0+current/cvs-all
>>
>
> I noticed them too viewing my mail in Mozilla 1.3b in several commit 
> messages on cvs-all. They seem to be the standard character that 
> Mozilla uses when it doesn't know how to render a character as they 
> turn up in large quantites in 90% of the spam I get.....
>
> I have no idea why they would be appearing where they are. They 
> appeared in Martin Blapp's two commits to editors/openoffice-devel and 
> Akinori Musha's commit to convert/ruby-lv.
>

Most likely they had a character in there that the mail app couldnt 
render like mentioned above, i've seen it with non-standard charsets.  
Odds are they are not using the same charset or a charset your mailer 
had an issue with...

just a wild guess...

--Larry