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maxwell

I'm an unhappy user of Outlook 2003 (no choice...). One of the reasons
for my unhappiness concerns sending text to people who aren't using
Outlook.

I initially went into the Outlook dlg box "Tools | Options", the "Mail
Format" tab, and set the "Compose in this message format" drop-down to
"Plain Text." But that wasn't good enough: two recipients (one a
majordomo, the other running an unidentified email client on a *nix
machine) got gibberish.

The gibberish turned out to be uuencoded with the 64 bit format. While
this is a standard format, my guess is that the headers Outlook was
sending could not be interpreted by the recipients' clients, which
therefore assumed plain text (or an older uuencode format).

So then I went into that same Outlook dlg box, and this time clicked on
the "Internet format" button, and checked the box that says "Encode
attachments in UUENCODE format when sending a plain text message."
This cleared up the problems (mostly, see below). I'm not sure WHY
this worked, since none of the msgs that had been received as gibberish
had any attachments. (One of them, to the majordomo, was a one-liner.)

The remaining problem is that each line of the msg, as viewed in the
*nix email client, ends in '=' or '=20'. I suspect that has to do with
Outlook sending CRs in addition to LFs (although I confess I don't
understand--0x20 is the space char).

I can't find any further settings in my Outlook client to get rid of
this last problem. Is this something that has to be set in the
Exchange server? If so, can you tell me what it is, so I can pass it
on to our systems folks?

Thanks--

Mike Maxwell
 
The gibberish turned out to be uuencoded with the 64 bit format.
Click to expand...

Probably not uuencoded, but MIME-encoded using Base64 encoding.
The remaining problem is that each line of the msg, as viewed in the
*nix email client, ends in '=' or '=20'. I suspect that has to do
with Outlook sending CRs in addition to LFs (although I confess I
don't understand--0x20 is the space char).
Click to expand...

This is the result of Quoted-Printable MIME encoding. the equal sign at the
end of a line indicated to the receiving mail client that the original
message line doesn't end, but continues on the next line. It's sort of a
"soft" carriange return or a continuation mark. The =20 say that the line
ends with a space.
I can't find any further settings in my Outlook client to get rid of
this last problem. Is this something that has to be set in the
Exchange server? If so, can you tell me what it is, so I can pass it
on to our systems folks?
Click to expand...

There was another message about this some time back (early August). Here's
a link.
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...ook.*++plain++text++registry#96036088968ed94b

The article http://support.microsoft.com/?id=278134 (cited in the above
thread) may also help.
 
Thanks--you're right about MIME-encoded, of course...

We're using MsExchange, so I guess the registry setting has no effect.
C'est la guerre.
 
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