Subject: Converting Quoted-Printable Back

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 17:41:22 -0400

Maybe I have all along been missing something that has been staring
me right in the face, but in all the time I have been using Un*x Pine,
I have not found a way to convert back to 8-bit characters those
characters that come in a quoted-printable form in email or news, for
example, =AF or =B3 or whatever in the text.

    With my particular hardware and software setup (I am using Un*x
Pine 3.93 as part of the software), I can display full 8-bit characters
in any one of the ISO-8859-x character sets.  Some newsgroups and even
some mailing lists send full 8-bit characters, and I see them
appropriately.  However, sometimes characters come in already in
quoted-printable form.  If possible, I would like Pine to turn those
=XX forms back into 8-bit characters so I can view them properly.

    Does anybody know how this can be done?  Have I been missing
something all along?

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
Home Page:  URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

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From: Satit Phiyanalinmat <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 10:06:23 -0700 (GMT)

unsubscribe pine-info

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 08:28:53 -0700 (PDT)

Paul,
If you see raw quoted-printable, it means Pine doesn't think this is a
MIME message --perhaps because a gateway or listserv corrupted the msg
in some way (e.g. stripped the MIME header out.)

In other words, Q-P decoding should be completely transparent, as long
as it is a syntactically correct MIME msg.

-teg

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From: [email-masked] (Orjan Johansen)
Date: 4 Jun 1996 21:55:20 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>as it is a syntactically correct MIME msg.

Which reminds me, why does pine use Q-P in its folder format? I sometimes
use "less" to browse through a saved mail folder, and it would be more
useful to have the folder in 8bit format, even if the original message
was received as Q-P. Nowadays this is becoming less of an issue for me
as our sendmail already converts incoming Q-P messages, but my sent-mail
folders still contain Q-P.

Greetings,
Ørjan.

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 13:26:56 -0700

> folders still contain Q-P.

Your real question is: "Why doesn't Pine rewrite folders to convert Q-P to
8bit"?

The answer is that we think it's morally wrong to tamper with message
internals.   We leave it in the same text that it arrived.

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 17:02:09 -0700 (PDT)

Orjan,
While I agree with Mark that an MUA shouldn't modify the CTE of messages
in incoming mailboxes, I'd like to add a comment regarding outgoing
(sent-mail) folders: We've found that it's *really* handy to have in
the sent-mail folder an exact copy of the message as given to the MTA.

I believe that if you use a modern sendmail and a recent Pine with
8BITMIME negotiation enabled, you will have what you want in your
sent-mail folder.

-teg

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From: [email-masked] (Orjan Johansen)
Date: 6 Jun 1996 05:21:00 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>in incoming mailboxes, I'd like to add a comment regarding outgoing

It occured to me that there are some cases where decoding might be
dangerous, like "=46rom ". I still think it is ugly. Imagine how much
simpler all this would be if files had been based on recursive lists of
bytes rather than a flat string where division markers cannot be reliably
distinguished from the text itself.

>8BITMIME negotiation enabled, you will have what you want in your

Possibly. At the moment my situation is that I have Pine 3.93 on all
my accounts except the one with 8BITMIME sendmail, so I haven't tested
that yet.

Greetings,
Ørjan.