Subject: Formatting error message -- why did it come up?

From: Matt Ackeret <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 11:15:48 -0800 (PST)

Part of a message from a mailing list:

without initializing it anywhere, ucontrol wouldn't load (I made that
mistake accidentally). Is that normal ?? That seems stran
   [Error: Formatting error: Non-hexadecimal character in QP encoding]

and here's what I see when I show it with full headers...

without initializing it anywhere, ucontrol wouldn't load (I made that=20
mistake accidentally). Is that normal ?? That seems strange. The extern=20=

I declared didn't have anything to do with ucontrol code...

---

As you can see, nothing strange (no pun intended).

Is this something on my end, or something in the message, that is causing
the Formatting error message to show up?
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From: Steve Huston <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 09:27:58 -0500 (EST)

>    [Error: Formatting error: Non-hexadecimal character in QP encoding]

I just started noticing the same thing on some mails I've been getting.  Seems
to be in random locations, but usually in the middle of a line:

============
> stop working.
Andre,
 
read the documentation (INSTALL) and/or check the code.
INSTALL says :
<<
- Perl version 5.005 or later is needed. At the moment Perl 5.8.2, 5.8.1
  and 5.6.1 seem to be
   [Error: Formatting error: Non-hexadecimal character in QP encoding]
============

There doesn't seem to be a difference if I look at the full headers or not, it
still shows the error message.  Tried exporting the message to a file, and
that didn't work either (gave the same error, followed by "Error on export:
Success" though the file was zero-bytes).

Viewing the message in Squirrelmail, I see the whole thing:

============
> stop working.
Andre, 

read the documentation (INSTALL) and/or check the code. 
INSTALL says : 
<<
- Perl version 5.005 or later is needed. At the moment Perl 5.8.2, 5.8.1
  and 5.6.1 seem to be most predictable. If UTF8/Unicode Perl support
  is needed, use 5.8.1 or later, and the most recent MailTools.

If It was changed, RELEASE_NOTES would also mention it.
============

For completeness, running Postfix 2.0.4, amavisd-new-20030314, and Cyrus IMAPD
2.1.12, Pine version 4.44.

-- 
Steve Huston - Unix Systems Admin, Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences
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