character encodings (was Re: dmesg question

[Markus Schönhaber]

Derek Broughton:

> I'm pretty good at most things computerish, but I have to admit 
> encodings have me mostly stumped.  I'm particularly surprised that while 
> the original post from Evuraan showed all sorts of "=?UTF-8..." 
> encodings, the responses from the people who could read it all provide 
> it an encoding that allows _me_ to read it.

There is not much magic in here.
In mail headers only US-ACSII is allowed. If you want to use characters
not in US-ASCII in, say, the From header field (which is the only part
of the OP where non-ASCII characters were used), you'll have to use a
representation that only uses US-ASCII. RFC 2047 defines a way to do that.
While your client was obviously unable to parse a RFC 2047 conformant
header field, in the responses to the OP the non-ASCII characters were
quoted in the *body* - where the encoding is an entirely different
matter, which your client seems to be able to handle.

> otoh, _your_ post gets quoted as from "=?ISO-8859-1...", and I bet when 
> I see my own response, it'll make sense too - so maybe it's just a bug 
> in KNode.

Probably.

Regards
  mks