Corrupt list archives?

[Erik Trulsson]

On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 05:58:29PM +0100, John Murphy wrote:
> Erik Trulsson <ertr1013 at student.uu.se> wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 05:28:39PM +0100, John Murphy wrote:
> >> Dan Nelson <dnelson at allantgroup.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> >In the last episode (Jul 09), John Murphy said:
> >> >> While browsing the freebsd-questions archives at freebsd.org and via
> >> >> google, I noticed that corruption occurs, under some circumstances,
> >> >> where "=" becomes "=3D" (3D is ascii for =) and some spaces are shown
> >> >> as "=20".
> >> >
> >> >Sounds like quoted-printable MIME encoding.
> >> >
> >> >> The first instances of the problem (found via google groups) occurred
> >> >> ~1994! The first archived in this list ~Feb. 2000.
> >> >> 
> >> >> The same corruption can be seen in the mailing.freebsd.questions
> >> >> newsgroup so it's not an http/html problem.
> >> >
> >> >Do you have a message-id of a message showing this?
> >> 
> >> This URL: <http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?dtfte05p8b3djcvtbp9o24fqpopbiakosj>
> >> shows the mess made of my original post.
> >
> >The archive shows your post exactly as it was sent.
> 
> I'm amazed.  "=" shows as "=3D" and "=3D" as "=3D3D" for me!
> Hyphen hyphen space (sig separator) as "--=20".

Yes, exactly.  That *is* how your mails are sent.
If you look at the headers of your mails they contain the line
 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
which means that some letters are encoded exactly as you describe.
Most mail-readers understand this format and automatically decodes
those letters.

> 
> >Your mails are
> >encoded with quoted-printable, which does encode some characters as you
> >indicate.  The archive is not corrupted since it displays the mails
> >exactly as they were received.
> 
> The browsers I've tried are set to Western (ISO-8859-1).

Irrelevant.

> 
> >It would be desirable to have the mails in the archive converted from
> >quoted-printable into standard 8-bit clean format, but no corruption
> >happens.
> 
> The apparent corruption must be visible to many users; can't be just me.

Yes, anybody who looks at web-archives will see exactly what you
describe, but the archives are not corrupted.  The problem is rather
that the archives don't understand the quoted-printable format, so the
mails are displayed as they were recieved, instead of being converted
into a more readable form.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se