On 24 Jul 2008, at 20:49, Bruce Napier wrote:
> I'm replying to the list, tho' I know the original was meant only for
> me, because a) I want to see the headers on one of my own posts, and  
> b)
> I'd be interested in other folks' views, especially Andy Greener's.

Sorry Bruce, only just got around to this - new toy, very  
distracting.... etc etc. :-)

A quick sample of recent postings to the list reveals no logic that I  
can discern - for no apparent reason that I can see, and sometimes  
with differing encodings for the same people (including me) I can see  
the following text encodings: UTF-8, US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 and  
Windows-1252 - the latter three are 7bit-character-based and very  
similar to each other (where the character sets differ one-for-one  
substitution occurs), but UTF-8 uses the full 8 bits and can therefore  
cause more problems if not interpreted correctly (using two bytes to  
encode some characters) - as Barry discovered.

Is it possible that Yahoo themselves have been changing the way their  
outgoing list mail is encoded recently? My own postings on the list  
have changed from US-ASCII to Windows-1252 and I've not consciously  
made any change at this end that might account for that.

Another complicating factor is that email clients (Apple Mail does  
this) can be configured to use the MIME type and encoding of the mail  
being replied to - so a new posting and a reply to the list might  
conceivably originate from the same person with different encodings.

Life's too short to worry much more about this!

-- 
Andy Greener
n.b. Whisper
Pangbourne, UK
http://www.nb-whisper.com

"Just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not  
incredibly stupid"



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