Email gurus: What the heck is this?

[ztirffritz]

I have an employee who is receiving emails from an outside sales rep that are all scrambled. They end up looking like this:

*****************
Did=20they=20return=20any=20posts?=20=20I=20know=20we=20consider=20the=20p=
osts=20out=20of=20warranty=20but=20I=20would=20like=20to=20know=20exactly=20=
what=20they=20sent=20back=20as=20I=20am=20certain=20this=20will=20be=20dis=
cussed=20at=20lunch.
******************

All of the header files are exposed, and every single space in the body of the message is replaced with '=20'. I can't figure it out. It is probably something simple. It looks like the original sender is using Outlook Express. My employee is using Outlook 2003. My guess was that it was either using a font that we didn't have installed, or it was sent in Rich Text or HTML, but the stuff below seems to indicate that it is a a plain-text file.

This also looks like it might mean something, but I'm not an expert at dissecting email gibberish:

*************
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0059_01C91E47.EDD1C9F0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
*************

[Seacrest]

It's Outlook Express garbage.
I see it all the time, when people use rich text or other crap like banners and background images.
I usually make my mail client (Thunderbird) default to showing me messages as plain text.

[what4]

The =20 looks like a representation of the hex code for a space. You sometimes find it in URLs as %20.

It could be that the sender is using one method of character encoding and the receiver is using another.

Or the text could have been copied and pasted -- though that would not account for the headers.

Check the character encoding settings. Try a couple of the options. Just remember where you started, so you can get back to it.

[what4]

Choices among character encodings, BTW, typically look like these:

Western (ISO-8859-1)
Unicode (UTF-8)
Western (Windows-1252)

[JoeH]

"Quoted printable" is a standard MIME encoding of 8-bit characters using the 7-bit ASCII character set. It was needed because the oldest mail SMTP protocols only support 7-bit characters. If you are seeing it displayed complete with the "=" signs, the email is either missing some part of the MIME headers, or is not set correctly to interpret the MIME encoding. Or the outside sales guy needs to turn off MIIME encoding as most modern mailers can handle 8-bit character transmission.