[opensuse] Re: [ctlug] Force Thunderbird to use ASCII only in plain text
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists." The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose. Sigh, Jeffrey On 5/17/19 8:08 AM, David Wolfe wrote:
[ Jeffrey L. Taylor writes: ]
Anyone know of a way to force Thunderbird to use ASCII only for outgoing e-mails? I'm trying to get rid of the hard-space (0xA0) for the first of two spaces after a period. Some e-mail and maybe mail servers don't handle it well. It is replaced by two question marks on the other end.
tl;dr I do not.
FWIW, I don't see 0xa0 characters in your message, so maybe my mailer or some relay along the route to my mailbox has "fixed" it for us.
I use Mutt on mailing lists. This is primarily a question my wife wants answered. Also, Gmail's SMTP server is up and down yesterday so getting tests of the various fixes is problematic. Checking the Drafts folder reveals that unchecking the Compose in HTML box in the Preferences/Options does do what I want. Thanks all, Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 17/05/2019 22.36, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it> left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists."
It displays perfectly here, both in Thunderbird and Alpine. When I save to file, I just see 0x73 0x20 0x20. I edited the first 0x20 to 0xA0 to see the effect in the file. I believe it is not Thunderbird who generates that character, it is some other application you use. Th simply leaves it there. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.0 x86_64 at Telcontar)
On 5/17/19 3:48 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 17/05/2019 22.36, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it> left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists." It displays perfectly here, both in Thunderbird and Alpine. When I save to file, I just see 0x73 0x20 0x20.
I edited the first 0x20 to 0xA0 to see the effect in the file. I believe it is not Thunderbird who generates that character, it is some other application you use. Th simply leaves it there.
For this usecase, unchecking "Compose in HTML Format" stops the insertion of the hard space. For this e-mail, it's checked. There should be a hard space after each period ending a sentence. I did not find a way to force Thunderbird to use 7bit ASCII. That wasn't the real issue, just a work around. All this reply text was typed directly into Thunderbird. It has been educational, but time consuming. I now know how to control HTML/plain text and charset encoding: globally, by account, and by individual e-mail. Also that Western, AKA Windows-1252, is a superset of Latin-1 with visible glyphs for the control codes from 0x80 to 0x9F range. What I'm going to do with all that, I haven't figured out. I thought by now everyone could handle Unicode. Turns out not to be the case. Thanks all, Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
On 5/17/19 3:48 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 17/05/2019 22.36, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it> left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists." It displays perfectly here, both in Thunderbird and Alpine. When I save to file, I just see 0x73 0x20 0x20.
I edited the first 0x20 to 0xA0 to see the effect in the file. I believe it is not Thunderbird who generates that character, it is some other application you use. Th simply leaves it there.
For this usecase, unchecking "Compose in HTML Format" stops the insertion of the hard space. For this e-mail, it's checked.
Yet your posting here was not in HTML, it was plain/text, transfer-encoding 8bit, contained only 7bit chars.
There should be a hard space after each period ending a sentence. I did not find a way to force Thunderbird to use 7bit ASCII. That wasn't the real issue, just a work around.
I thought by now everyone could handle Unicode. Turns out not to be the case.
What have you found that doesn't handle unicode? -- Per Jessen, Zürich (13.1°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - your free DNS host, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 5/18/19 2:38 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
On 5/17/19 3:48 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 17/05/2019 22.36, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it> left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists." It displays perfectly here, both in Thunderbird and Alpine. When I save to file, I just see 0x73 0x20 0x20.
I edited the first 0x20 to 0xA0 to see the effect in the file. I believe it is not Thunderbird who generates that character, it is some other application you use. Th simply leaves it there.
For this usecase, unchecking "Compose in HTML Format" stops the insertion of the hard space. For this e-mail, it's checked.
Yet your posting here was not in HTML, it was plain/text, transfer-encoding 8bit, contained only 7bit chars.
This is the point. I'm trying to find a setting for a minimal charset and formatting that will do what my wife wants and not get mangled by the receiving end. Setting charset to Western and formatting to plain text only is not enough to prevent hard spaces. The "Compose in HTML format" box must be unchecked.
There should be a hard space after each period ending a sentence. I did not find a way to force Thunderbird to use 7bit ASCII. That wasn't the real issue, just a work around.
I thought by now everyone could handle Unicode. Turns out not to be the case.
What have you found that doesn't handle unicode?
One reply was done on a Mac w/ current MacOS, another on Windows7. I can check what the e-mail clients were. Knowing the users involved, probably the default client with no changes to the settings. I will check. Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
On 5/18/19 2:38 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
On 5/17/19 3:48 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 17/05/2019 22.36, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it> left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists." It displays perfectly here, both in Thunderbird and Alpine. When I save to file, I just see 0x73 0x20 0x20.
I edited the first 0x20 to 0xA0 to see the effect in the file. I believe it is not Thunderbird who generates that character, it is some other application you use. Th simply leaves it there.
For this usecase, unchecking "Compose in HTML Format" stops the insertion of the hard space. For this e-mail, it's checked.
Yet your posting here was not in HTML, it was plain/text, transfer-encoding 8bit, contained only 7bit chars.
This is the point. I'm trying to find a setting for a minimal charset and formatting that will do what my wife wants and not get mangled by the receiving end. Setting charset to Western and formatting to plain text only is not enough to prevent hard spaces. The "Compose in HTML format" box must be unchecked.
I always use plaintext so I guess I've never come across it. It sounds truly weird that using standard HTML and standard HTML entities should cause a problem for any HTML renderer. Even with 8bit chars not being encoded.
There should be a hard space after each period ending a sentence. I did not find a way to force Thunderbird to use 7bit ASCII. That wasn't the real issue, just a work around.
I thought by now everyone could handle Unicode. Turns out not to be the case.
What have you found that doesn't handle unicode?
One reply was done on a Mac w/ current MacOS, another on Windows7. I can check what the e-mail clients were. Knowing the users involved, probably the default client with no changes to the settings. I will check.
Windows7 being Microsoft and ancient - yeah, I could well imagine it might not be quite ajour with UTF8 support. Anything made in the last 10 years, I would expect to have no issue with UTF8 (I don't know about full Unicode support). -- Per Jessen, Zürich (15.4°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - free dynamic DNS, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 2019/05/18 07:06, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
This is the point. I'm trying to find a setting for a minimal charset and formatting that will do what my wife wants and not get mangled by the receiving end. Setting charset to Western and formatting to plain text only is not enough to prevent hard spaces. The "Compose in HTML format" box must be unchecked.
You are going in the wrong direction. Turn on unicode. The email you said had the problem had western encoding , not UTF-8. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
On 18/05/2019 04.48, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
On 5/17/19 3:48 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 17/05/2019 22.36, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it> left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists." It displays perfectly here, both in Thunderbird and Alpine. When I save to file, I just see 0x73 0x20 0x20.
I edited the first 0x20 to 0xA0 to see the effect in the file. I believe it is not Thunderbird who generates that character, it is some other application you use. Th simply leaves it there.
For this usecase, unchecking "Compose in HTML Format" stops the insertion of the hard space. For this e-mail, it's checked. There should be a hard space after each period ending a sentence. I did not find a way to force Thunderbird to use 7bit ASCII. That wasn't the real issue, just a work around.
Yes, in this email I see it, but only when saving to file and looking with a hex editor: hexdump -C p 6b0 68 20 76 69 73 69 62 6c 65 20 67 6c 79 70 68 73 |h visible glyphs 6c0 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68 65 20 63 6f 6e 74 72 6f 6c | for the control 6d0 20 63 6f 64 65 73 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 30 78 38 30 | codes from 0x80 6e0 20 74 6f 20 30 78 39 46 20 0a 72 61 6e 67 65 2e | to 0x9F .range. 6f0 c2 a0 20 57 68 61 74 20 49 27 6d 20 67 6f 69 6e |.. What I'm goin ***** 700 67 20 74 6f 20 64 6f 20 77 69 74 68 20 61 6c 6c |g to do with all In Thunderbird or Alpine, your mail displays perfectly. I have never encountered this problem you say, but then, I have never written using two spaces in my life. I'll try now. Here. Using Thunderbird in plain text mode.
All this reply text was typed directly into Thunderbird.
It has been educational, but time consuming. I now know how to control HTML/plain text and charset encoding: globally, by account, and by individual e-mail. Also that Western, AKA Windows-1252, is a superset of Latin-1 with visible glyphs for the control codes from 0x80 to 0x9F range. What I'm going to do with all that, I haven't figured out. I thought by now everyone could handle Unicode. Turns out not to be the case.
No, they don't. Windows uses a different solution than Linux. But email doesn't have problems if done correctly, because the headers say what exact charset is used. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.0 x86_64 at Telcontar)
On 18/05/2019 12.50, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 18/05/2019 04.48, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
In Thunderbird or Alpine, your mail displays perfectly. I have never encountered this problem you say, but then, I have never written using two spaces in my life. I'll try now. Here. Using Thunderbird in plain text mode.
And now using Thunderbird in html mode. Here. Done. But posting in plain text only for the list. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.0 x86_64 at Telcontar)
On 18/05/2019 12.50, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 18/05/2019 04.48, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Yes, in this email I see it, but only when saving to file and looking with a hex editor:
hexdump -C p
6b0 68 20 76 69 73 69 62 6c 65 20 67 6c 79 70 68 73 |h visible glyphs 6c0 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68 65 20 63 6f 6e 74 72 6f 6c | for the control 6d0 20 63 6f 64 65 73 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 30 78 38 30 | codes from 0x80 6e0 20 74 6f 20 30 78 39 46 20 0a 72 61 6e 67 65 2e | to 0x9F .range. 6f0 c2 a0 20 57 68 61 74 20 49 27 6d 20 67 6f 69 6e |.. What I'm goin ***** 700 67 20 74 6f 20 64 6f 20 77 69 74 68 20 61 6c 6c |g to do with all
In Thunderbird or Alpine, your mail displays perfectly. I have never encountered this problem you say, but then, I have never written using two spaces in my life. I'll try now. Here. Using Thunderbird in plain text mode.
If I look at the mail in the Sent folder I see (saved as p.eml from thunderbird): 79 20 6e 6f 77 2e 20 20 48 65 72 65 2e 20 20 55 |y now. Here. U| ***** Double plain spaces. Looking at the same mail as it is received back, I see: 49 27 6c 6c 20 74 72 79 20 6e 6f 77 2e 20 20 48 |I'll try now. H| 65 72 65 2e 20 20 55 73 69 6e 67 20 54 68 75 6e |ere. Using Thun| ***** Again, it is double plain space. I'll now look at it in Alpine (saving as file) 6e 6f 77 2e 20 20 48 65 72 65 2e 20 20 55 73 69 |now. Here. Usi| ***** It is plain double spaces. The compossing was done in Thunderbird, plain text mode - I can not compose in html to this mail list. Ok, did another test to the list using another account, I'll wait till it arrives. Thunderbird: «And now using Thunderbird in html mode. Here. Done. But posting in plain text only for the list.» 6d 6f 64 65 2e 0d 0a 0d 0a 0d 0a 41 6e 64 20 6e |mode.......And n| 6f 77 20 75 73 69 6e 67 20 54 68 75 6e 64 65 72 |ow using Thunder| 62 69 72 64 20 69 6e 20 68 74 6d 6c 20 6d 6f 64 |bird in html mod| 65 2e 3d 41 30 20 48 65 72 65 2e 3d 41 30 20 44 |e.=A0 Here.=A0 D| *********** 6f 6e 65 2e 3d 41 30 20 42 75 74 20 70 6f 73 74 |one.=A0 But post| 69 6e 67 20 3d 0d 0a 69 6e 0d 0a 70 6c 61 69 6e |ing =..in..plain| 20 74 65 78 74 20 6f 6e 6c 79 20 66 6f 72 20 74 | text only for t| 68 65 20 6c 69 73 74 2e 0d 0a 0d 0a 2d 2d 3d 32 |he list.....--=2| Only when looking at "the code" I can see strange things, but not in what Thunderbird displays. Alpine: 0a 41 6e 64 20 6e 6f 77 20 75 73 69 6e 67 20 54 |.And now using T| 68 75 6e 64 65 72 62 69 72 64 20 69 6e 20 68 74 |hunderbird in ht| 6d 6c 20 6d 6f 64 65 2e c2 a0 20 48 65 72 65 2e |ml mode... Here.| ******** c2 a0 20 44 6f 6e 65 2e c2 a0 20 42 75 74 20 70 |.. Done... But p| 6f 73 74 69 6e 67 20 69 6e 0a 70 6c 61 69 6e 20 |osting in.plain | Only alpine, when saving the post to a file (hopefully raw, Th saves as .eml) I can see the "A0 20" combo, preceded with c2. It is probably unicode (UTF-8) - yes, it is: cer@Telcontar:~> file ppp ppp: UTF-8 Unicode text cer@Telcontar:~> Saving from alpine with full ^H view, I save to file again, and dump to hex: 64 20 69 6e 20 68 74 6d 6c 20 6d 6f 64 65 2e c2 |d in html mode..| a0 20 48 65 72 65 2e c2 a0 20 44 6f 6e 65 2e c2 |. Here... Done..| ********* a0 20 42 75 74 20 70 6f 73 74 69 6e 67 20 69 6e |. But posting in| Same combination. I can't read UTF in raw myself. But in all cases, what Thunderbird or Alpine displays is correct, I just see two spaces. Now I try pasting from Thunderbird to leafpad. 6c 20 6d 6f 64 65 2e 20 20 48 65 72 65 2e 20 20 |l mode. Here. | ****** Two plain spaces, as it should be. I don't see any problem, except that internally it is encoded differently, I have no idea why. But then, I never type intentionally two spaces after a dot. It must have some special significance I'm not aware of. Google "two spaces after a period". I get: The Complete Manual on Typography (2003) states that "The typewriter tradition of separating sentences with two word spaces after a period has no place in typesetting" and the single space is "standard typographic practice". Sentence spacing - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing Otras preguntas de los usuarios Should there be 2 spaces after a period? Unless you are typing on an actual typewriter, you no longer have to put two spaces after a period. Or a question mark. Or an exclamation point. The rule applies to all end punctuation.12 ago. 2014 Nothing Says Over 40 Like Two Spaces after a Period! | Cult of ... https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/two-spaces-after-period/ Buscar: Should there be 2 spaces after a period? Should there be 2 spaces after a full stop? Many people associate double spacing with a bygone era of clattering typewriters. Others find it makes text look gappy and distracting. And to some, defiantly typing two spaces comes across as pedantic. After all, we live in an age where modern fonts and software are designed for single spaces. One space or two after a full stop? - Emphasis Training https://www.writing-skills.com/one-space-two-full-stop This one explains the history. Never heard of it in my country. Curious! Now, why does Thunderbird change a double space to "a0 20"? Guessing, so that this does not happen when flowing text: «And now using Thunderbird in html mode. » « Here. Done. But posting in plain text » «only for the list.» The second line is flowed incorrectly. This would be the correct version «And now using Thunderbird in html mode. » «Here. Done. But posting in plain text » «only for the list.» Another type of flowing would replace the two spaces with one. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.0 x86_64 at Telcontar)
OOPS, sorry. This went to the wrong list. On 5/17/19 3:36 PM, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
Below is the reply, composed in Thunderbird, that has been queued up to send thru a Gmail app server (smtp.gmail.com) for two days now. I've re-routed it thru my Old School mail route: emacs, Mutt, Postfix, a local Web/Email hosting company (noise.org). How much of the original charset, Content-* headers, and Email headers will survive I won't known until the Bcc reaches me. When it left emacs, there was a UTF-8 hard space after "... mailing lists."
The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose.
Sigh, Jeffrey
On 5/17/19 8:08 AM, David Wolfe wrote:
[ Jeffrey L. Taylor writes: ]
Anyone know of a way to force Thunderbird to use ASCII only for outgoing e-mails? I'm trying to get rid of the hard-space (0xA0) for the first of two spaces after a period. Some e-mail and maybe mail servers don't handle it well. It is replaced by two question marks on the other end.
tl;dr I do not.
FWIW, I don't see 0xa0 characters in your message, so maybe my mailer or some relay along the route to my mailbox has "fixed" it for us.
I use Mutt on mailing lists. This is primarily a question my wife wants answered. Also, Gmail's SMTP server is up and down yesterday so getting tests of the various fixes is problematic. Checking the Drafts folder reveals that unchecking the Compose in HTML box in the Preferences/Options does do what I want.
Thanks all, Jeffrey
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org
participants (5)
-
Carlos E. R. -
Carlos E. R. -
Jeffrey Taylor -
L A Walsh -
Per Jessen