At 12:00 PM 3/10/00 -0500, Francoise Becker wrote:
>On 10 Mar 00, at 10:22, G ran Larsson wrote:
>
>> We just started to use a Bottom Banner on one of our lists. The problem 
>> is that it seems to upset the characters i the body text. The swedish
>> characters å, ä and ö doesn't show up properly. Instead the text is
>> full of f=F6 and such. This is true to postings to Hotmail, GroupWise,
>> LotusNotes and perhaps some other e-mail applications.
>
>This is due to the fact that there isn't only one way to encode
>special characters. Some email applications use quoted-printable,
>others use 8-bit.

That should not be the reason.  The mail protocols allow the encoding
to be specified via a Content-Transfer-Encoding header, which
allows conversion as needed (to QP for transfer through a 7-bit
gateway, or to 8bit for display, etc.).  If no such header is
present, it means 7bit, and there shouldn't be any high-bit
characters at all.

>If you assume quoted-printable, then it will look
>like garbage on mail using 8-bit codes. If you assume 8-bit codes,
>it will look like garbage on mail using quoted-printable.

Not if properly labeled, and properly interpreted at the client side.
I don't know, however, whether LISTSERV attempts to match up the
bottom banner encoding with any CTE header it may put on the mail.

(IMHO, most lists should probably restrict themselves to 7-bit since
otherwise a Charset is needed in the headers to interpret
the 8-bit characters anyway.)

Cheers,
Stan