List mail/archives, encodings

[Tim]

On Sun, 2010-07-18 at 10:15 -0700, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> Thankfully, 
> I have not seen any more mail with encodings that made the messages
> unreadable.  Apparently I was the only person seeing this so it could
> be a problem with me or yahoo mail?

It sounds quite likely it was Yahoo mail.  But here's one way it could
be at your end:  Have you told your mail client, or web browser, to
presume a particular character encoding by default, or to override the
character encoding details provided with the messages?  If so, you could
be forcing an incorrect interpretation.

The default encoding for e-mail is US-ASCII, anything else should
explicitly declare what it actually uses.  And the default for most HTML
is iso-8859-1 (likewise, anything else should explicitly describe
itself).  XML uses UTF-8, by default, if I recall correctly.

By "default," that means that if the data doesn't come with a
description of what it is using, then that's what should be expected.
It doesn't mean that all mail/web-pages must use those encoding schemes.

> Tim,
> Have you had any trouble viewing messages through yahoo mail?  

Me, or another Tim?  I don't use the webmail service, it could be a
cause of your problem.  I merely send messages to the list using a yahoo
address in my "from" field.  I receive mail sent to another address,
that has nothing to do with Yahoo.

I haven't seen anything wrong with the messages that you previously drew
to our attention.  So, the problem would appear to be somewhere between
yourself and the list.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.