Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to read, as you need to open each attachment individually.įortunately, in recent years mail servers and software have progressed to the point where this isn’t the issue it once was. One list that I’m on, for example, creates a digest that contains the individual messages as “.eml” attachments, which preserve each message in its original form. Some mailing list software has multiple types of digesting, some of which may handle the situation better. If you’re a list owner or moderator, there’s not much you can do for the list itself.Īs a recipient, you may have some options. Since I’ve never seen that happen, I assume there’s some reason this can’t be done.Īs a result, all messages are collected into each digest in raw form. In theory, I suppose, the mailing list software could try to normalize: understand the encoding used and convert it to a single standard which it would then use to send the digest. The “problem” is that not all messages are encoded using “quoted-printable”. It arrives less frequently, but includes multiple messages instead of just one. Rather than getting a number of individual messages, many mailing lists allow you to get a digest version instead. Digests are specialĪ digest is a collection of emails bundled into a single message. It sees it as unencoded plain text email and displays it as-is. As a result, your mail program doesn’t know that it should decode the encoded characters. Your mailing list software has probably removed or overridden the header information. In the case of your mailing list, the approvals are likely arriving in some kind of “raw” form. If you’re seeing the quoted-printable characters in their quoted-printable form, that header is either missing, malformed, or it’s been overlooked. Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable When an email message uses quoted-printable, one of the hidden headers - the information you don’t normally see - explicitly says so. How mail programs identify quoted-printable The work-around is to represent them in a way that doesn’t confuse the old mailers. Non-printable characters in email messages can confuse some email software, particularly older, legacy systems. That’s why they’re called “non-printable”. Quoted-printable is one of several encodings used to get around the fact that not all mail software (and in the past, not all network transports) can handle what are called “non-printable” characters, or certain types of non-alphanumeric characters.ĬR and LF, for example, don’t cause anything to be displayed they just “mean something”: the end of a line. In fact, any character can be represented as a three character “=” sequence in quoted-printable. CR, LF, and CRLF are all used to indicate the end of a line of text in plain text emails. “=3D” is, in fact, an equal sign. =0D is a Carriage Return (CR), =0A is a Line Feed (LF), and =0D=0A is a CRLF combination. When you see something like =3D, what you’re seeing is a single character of “quoted-printable” encoding. That’s correct - not all “plain text” is created equal. The problem is that there’s “plain text” email, and then there’s “plain text” email.
Outlook for Mac users also have the option to customize the reply header block.You’d think that with plain-text email having been around for as long as it has, issues like this would have been resolved by now. This setting can be different for HTML and plain text messages. The only reply format option is to indent the original message (or not). To access the options in Outlook for Mac, click on Outlook in the top bar and choose Preferences from the menu then click Composing. Unlike Outlook for Windows, you can change the reply header format. The only option is to indent or not (with separate options for HTML or plain text message format). Outlook for Mac doesn't support changing the reply format to include line prefixes.