I have a LAMP web application that emails users. Some users have complained that instead of seeing html email messages, they see weird sequences of characters such as =0D or =3D. I can't reproduce this bug with any of my email clients : gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, thunderbird, blackberry or iphone. Does anyone know what's going on and how to fix this?
+1
A:
When you see something like =3D, what you're seeing is a single character in what's called "quoted-printable" encoding. "=3D" is, in fact, an equal sign. =0D is a Carriage Return (CR), =0A is a Line Feed (LF)
Taken from Not all 'plain-text' is created equal...
The link will provide an in-depth detailed description as to what is going on.
Anthony Forloney
2010-02-23 22:11:35
Not really. If those users would be sending the mail that gets garbled they would probably need to change their encoding settings. In this case, a mail generated by the OP's application is showing up in the wrong way.
VoidPointer
2010-02-23 22:16:55
That's only true if the site is actually setting the MIME correctly to begin with, which should be John's first point of investigation. Many webmail and client email clients are smart enough to compensate for incorrect or missing MIME declarations, so not everybody would see the problem. Assuming he's sending out with the correct MIME, then yes, it's a downstream issue and users should start troubleshooting what's going on.
Guildencrantz
2010-02-26 20:48:10
+2
A:
This is called quoted printable encoding. Some system that handles the mail while it is being delivered to the recipients that are seeing the offending characters messes up the encoding or the header information about the encoding.
Check whether the encoding you are setting when sending the mail matches what you are writing to the mail and whether that is also what is received by other people.
VoidPointer
2010-02-23 22:15:36