TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Request help From:Guy McDonald <guym -at- DAKA -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 29 Dec 1995 22:45:38 -0800
Does anyone know the definitive answer to what Character Set is used by the
majority of mail programs? I have run into some difficulty when using
extended 8 bit characters (i.e., ISO 8859-1 or US-ASCII) in either MIME or
UUENCODE.
I became very upset when hearing that my messages "crashed" another persons
system, which certainly is NOT my purpose here. I do not believe the
problem was on her end, or the OKState server. She uses Eudora, which I
used last year, progressing to Pegasus, then EMC and now MS Exchange. All
of these changes have greatly enhanced my setup here, however there are
many who run mail programs that cannot digest certain imbedded object
structures or attachments. Originally I communicated with the list owner
(Eric Ray). We thought it may have been something as simple as word wrap
recognition by the mainframe at OKState. This is definitely not true with
regards to the garbled crap that is attached to my messages.
Kat Nagel told me off list:
"What I'm getting is -not- simply a garbled email message. It is an
attached file named WINMAIL.DAT that contains junk that I can't decode
using -either- MIME or uudecode software. It is apparently some kind of
.sig statement that WINMAIL adds to each outgoing message unless you
disable the 'feature'. When received by another machine running WINMAIL,
it gets decoded into a little Windows ad. When it hits another type of
email software, it chokes the sucker."
This is probably a easy config fix, and I know someone out there has the
answer. Your help would be appreciated by all, considering I hope that all
of us continue to exchange ideas in this forum. Not to mention, I will not
be the only person with this problem in the future (as Billy Boy & his
elves continue to tweak software over at Microsoft).