In message <[log in to unmask]> on Wed, 10 Aug 2005, 
Henry B. Crawford <[log in to unmask]> wrote
>Why is there so much computer gobbledygook interlaced within the MUSEUM-L
>posts?  Is there something wrong with the listserv?  I find it very hard to
>read the posts with so many repeated words, >'s, <'s, </html>
>=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=, and such.  Most of them contain the statement "This is a
>multi-part message in MIME format."  What the heck does that mean?
>
>There are times I don't read MUSEUM-L because of all the cyber-trash mixed
>in.  Is anyone else having this problem?  Is there something that can be
>done to eliminate or minimize that?  I'm no computer nerd, but I have been
>using email and the internet for about 10 years.  It seems to me that
>something ought to be done to get rid of all that stuff.

There are two distinct problems here.

1. HTML messages
Many people have configured their email software to encode their 
messages in HTML, as though they were Web pages. This accounts for most 
of the angle brackets and their contents that you are seeing. Though 
this makes messages look "pretty" if you view them using a program that 
interprets HTML, such as a Web browser or a program such as Microsoft 
Outlook which invokes Web browser functions, it is normally 
inappropriate and discourteous for straightforward mailing lists such as 
MUSEUM-L. It not only increases the size of messages but also often 
leads to these formatting codes being displayed instead of just being 
used to control the layout, as you have found. The problem is 
particularly severe for people who receive compilations of messages in 
"digest" format, because software often fails to recognize and interpret 
HTML coding within these.

In most cases the software that generates these messages also creates a 
"plain text" version. The software you use to view messages should 
recognize the formats that are present in the message and either give 
you the choice of which you want to see or else display by default one 
which it can handle properly. Unfortunately this does not always work as 
it should, either (a) because the sending program does not identify the 
formats of the contents correctly in the message headers, or (b) because 
these headers are changed by the mailing list software through which 
messages pass, or (c) because the receiving program does not interpret 
them correctly.

The safest thing is for people to configure their email programs to send 
messages as "plain text" only. This means a change from the default 
configuration of popular programs such as Microsoft Outlook, but it will 
help to ensure that recipients can read messages without problems.

2. MIME encoding
Many email systems can handle only "7-bit" characters, i.e. the most 
common letters, numbers and punctuation marks. A common way to overcome 
this limitation is to use "quoted printable" encoding, according to 
which other characters are encoded as combinations of two numbers or 
letters preceded by an equals sign "=".  This is described at 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable>. As an equals sign is 
used to indicate a code, an equals sign itself has to be encoded if it 
is required to appear in the message. Its code is =3D, so that the 
string you saw as =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D is just a string of equals signs: 
=====

Again, this encoding should be dealt with "behind the scenes" if all the 
software handling the message behaves as it should, but programs at the 
three stages (a), (b) and (c) above can fail to handle it properly, 
leaving the encoded characters visible.

Your software is labelled in your message header as:

User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/9.0.2509
Mime-version: 1.0

and the latter label indicates that it claims to handle MIME-encoded 
messages. It would be necessary to examine the headers of messages that 
do not display properly to find out whether they are properly labelled 
or whether your software is not interpreting the labels correctly.

I'm sorry for the length of this message, but I hope that it will help 
you to understand the nature of the "computer gobbledygook" you are 
seeing, and encourage others to check that they are not generating it 
unnecessarily.

Regards

Leonard Will

-- 
Willpower Information       (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
Information Management Consultants              Tel: +44 (0)20 8372 0092
27 Calshot Way, Enfield, Middlesex EN2 7BQ, UK. Fax: +44 (0)870 051 7276
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