On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:05:16 -0500, Douglas Winship <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>Does LISTSERV have a system for automatically converting items

No.  LISTSERV performs no conversions of this nature.

>into legible text without the "=/=20" garbage"?  

It is not "garbage".  It is an orderly encoding scheme for safely transmitting
8bit data in the 7bit email system.  A MIME-aware mail client will encode a
message containing 8bit characters in QP encoding.  LISTSERV will pass it
through unchanged.  The receiving mail client, if also MIME-aware, will
display the message correctly.  If the receiving mail client is not
MIME-aware, then the =20, =3D and other QP encoded char will appear that way. 
If you are manually editing a QP encoded message then you need to be aware of
the QP encoding rules and take special care to maintain the QP encoding so
that when the message is distributed, it will appear correctly for users with
MIME-aware mail clients.  If you break the encoding rules, then the message
may not display correctly for any user.

>And fix the urls for
>websites when extraneous charcters are inroduced by "quoted-printable"?

This is not part of QP (unless a linewrap occurs in the URL).  The
"HTML-ization" of certain characters (again 8bit char and spaces and other
char) is part of a revised HTML standard, not part of MIME/QP encoding.

>And, by the way, what earthly use does "quoted-printable" serve, anyway?

As noted above, it is useful for the successful transmission of 8bit character
data in the 7bit email system.  QP encoding is normally used with messages
that are already mostly plain text, and only a few 8bit char so that even if
the receiving mail client is not MIME-aware, most of the message is
understandable.  Other encoding schemes (Base64, uuencode) may also be used
for messages, but are more often used for truly binary data (images, Word
documents, Excel documents, etc.)

Examples of 8bit character data include all the 'special' European characters
as well a number of special symbols:

 ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏ
 àáâãäåæçèéêëìíîï
 ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞß
 ðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿ
  ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬­®¯
 °±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿


>Didn't it originate with Novell GroupWise,

No.  QP Encoding is part of the MIME standards for internet email, see 
RFC 2045 for the details.