Thanks Jason, The RFC 2047 was exactly what I was missing. Especially nice that it is so short and sweet -- also easy to miss. Your summary is even more succinct.
It appears that this is a useful rfc for using non latin 1 languages in subjects and the 'personal' part of from/to addresses. But "=?iso-8859-1?B?...?=" or "=?iso-8859-1?Q?...?=" are both useless and obvious attempts to confuse. So I think they both signal spam. Living in NZ you may be closer to the action in character coding and where more people are aware of this facility. Are there any useful exceptions to ruling these two as spam? Don ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jason Lea" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "James Users List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 2:50 PM Subject: Re: Interpreting Subject line > I have been playing around with email encoding in the last few days - > trying to send UTF-8 encoded email so that stuff is defined in RFC2047... > > encoded-word = "=?" charset "?" encoding "?" encoded-text "?=" > > charset=iso-8859-1 (normal Latin-1 encoding) > encoding=B (can be either B or Q encoding) > encoded-text=UGF5IFBlbm5pZXMgb24gdGhlIERvbGxhciBmb3IgeW91ciBQcmVzY3JpcCh0aW9 uIQ== > > By chosing the 'B' encoding it is causing every character to be encoded > using BASE64 encoding. Normally if you send mostly ASCII characters you > would choose type Q where the 8-bit characters are converted into =XX > format (eg '=' becomes '=3D', SPACE becomes '=20'). > > see here for more info http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2047 > > Vinny wrote: > > >Sorry if this sounds stupid, but how do you interpret that crazy string of > >characters? Is that sound king of screwed up MD5 sum or something? > > > > > > > >>=?iso-8859-1?B?>UGF5IFBlbm5pZXMgb24gdGhlIERvbGxhciBmb3IgeW91ciBQcmVzY3JpcC h > >> > >> > >0a > > > > > >>W9uIQ==?= > >> > >> > > > > > >-Vinny > > > > > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- > >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > > > > > -- > Jason Lea > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
