On Wed, 2021-02-24 at 08:17 -0600, Michael Hennebry wrote:
In other people's posts, I've occasionally seen what I think was supposed to be whitespace as question marks in black diamonds.. This time my own blanks came back to me that way. They stay that way in alpines default editor. Using its vim editor, I see blue vertical strokes followed by blanks. Any idea what is happening?
I suspect it might have something to do with me using alpine through ssh. That said, I thought blanks were immune to that sort of thing.
It may well depend on what those white spaces are.
If they're tabs or linebreaks, or a person has sent a non-breaking space (sometimes by accident, as they've hit shift+space), they can do funny things through email. Especially when messages get transcoded (7-bit to 8-bit, utf-8, quoted-printable, format=flowed [with ignorable but marked linewrapping], plain text, HTML, etc).
Seeing as you mention SSH, is your encoding scheme the same on both ends (server and client)? That kind of thing is common with mangled UTF-8 coding/decoding.
And it can be your email client. Mine (evolution) seems to stuff up on some content, and the dots in domain names sometimes disappear when it renders the text (breaking links). I don't know if it's screwing up decoding, or the original messages were badly encoded. The raw email looks fine, I can see them in there.