Spaces replaced by question marks?

[Ed Blackman]

In the past few weeks, I've been seeing lots of question marks in my mutt display, and finally took some time to track down what was happening so I could find out what's happening, and if I can get rid of them.

   0001160  sp   c   a   n   :  nl  sp  sp  sp  sp  sp  sp  sp  sp   *  sp
   0001200   T   r   a   c   k  sp   y   o   u   r  sp   s   h   i   p   m

Another example:
"Suzie,
?
This email"

od -a:
   0000000   S   u   z   i   e   ,  nl  sp  nl   T   h   i   s  sp

The messages I've seen affected have these MIME properties:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable







Ed

In the display, I'll see "? ? ? ? * Track your shipment". If I pipe the part being displayed to "od -a", I see runs of spaces where the display shows alternating question marks and spaces: That makes the latter example understandable, if not desirable: having unquoted spaces at the end of the line is a violation of rule 3 of RFC2045, section 6.7: "Octets with values of 9 and 32 MAY be represented as US-ASCII TAB (HT) and SPACE characters, respectively, but MUST NOT be so represented at the end of an encoded line. Any TAB (HT) or SPACE characters on an encoded line MUST thus be followed on that line by a printable character." But that rule concludes with "Therefore, when decoding a Quoted-Printable body, any trailing white space on a line must be deleted, as it will necessarily have been added by intermediate transport agents." I'd greatly prefer that to question marks. I also don't see why leading runs of spaces, and runs of spaces in the middle of printable characters, also get the "?". Mutt 1.5.20 (2009-06-14) on Ubuntu lucid, with Michael Elkin's lenient RFC2047 patch applied. Other configuration details available on request.

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