I know I'm walking on a virtual mine field here, so I'll try to tread
lightly.  I've read many of the previous discussions on why you should or
should not edit the archives and I think I understand the various positions.
I run a list for Visual Basic programming and my main interest in the
archives is preserving their usability for the list members.  There's
certain messages I'd like to remove that either don't pertain to VB (i.e.
are grossly off topic), contain a virus attachment, or are flame wars.
Another common occurrence is for someone to post a message only to receive 5
replies telling them to check the archives.  Imagine the frustration of
searching the archives only to find 95% of the results say to search the
archives.  Anyway, the problem I'm having is not in the ethics of my actions
(I can live with myself after editing the archives), but rather the
logistics.

We use Microsoft Exchange Server v5.5 and my email client is Outlook 98.
What happens is when I try to retrieve a log by issuing the command "GET
VISBAS-BEGINNERS LOGXXXXX" I get the file as a .txt attachment with the
following in the body of the message:

"This message uses a character set that is not supported by the Internet
Service.  To view the original message content,  open the attached message.
If the text doesn't display correctly, save the attachment to disk, and then
open it using a viewer that can display the original character set."

OK, so I open the .txt attachment (using Notepad or Word) and all the equal
signs have been converted to "=3D"; some (not all) of the apostrophes have
been converted to "=92" or "=3D92"; other characters have also been
converted to various things.  I could do a search and replace to restore
these characters, but being that this is a programming list someone could
certainly have "if x=92 then" in the body of their message and it would be a
bad thing to blanket convert this to "if x' then".

I'm sure the Exchange Server is doing this mangling because the messages
appear fine if I search the archives via the web interface.  My question is,
what can I do about this?  How can I get the logs in plain old text without
this mangling?  If it's hopeless I'll resign myself to understanding I just
can't edit the archives.  If there's another way I'd be very happy to hear
about it.  Thanks!

Darryl