Re: HIT: TECH: Help with decoding gibberish

[Hinchingbrooke School <Hinchingb-pess@BBCNC.ORG.UK>]

I've had two helpful replies plus several people saying "I find it
impossible too!"
hope this helps:
1. Usually, I delete it.  It's caused by programs that automatically
encode attachements. There will usually be a message that your email
program will display telling you whether or not it's MIME or
UUENCODED. In either case, you can transfer the message to your
pc/mac as an ascii file and run a decoding program to decipher it
such as MIME decoding or UUDECODE. You can find these programs as
shareware or they may already be available to you on your system, but
you have to know what you're looking for.

The simplest solution is to politely write to the person that posted
the message, include a little, as you did, and ask that the message
be resent as an ASCII file. It will usually take a little time, since
the sender will have to delve into the email directions to figure out
how to send/attach an ASCII file. I'd wager that the message will be
repeated today or tomorrow in ASCII format with an apology or short
explanation.

Dan Robinson
drobinson@info.hwwilson.com


2.
I think the simple solution is for all of us (regardless of platform) to
remember that messages created off-line and then copied or attached
should be in plain ASCII text format. That means (in the Mac case) that
you don't have bold, italic, underline or typographer's quotes (the curly
ones) and no characters that require the Cmd,Opt, or Ctrl keys to
generate (again, on the Mac -- accented or other letters with diacritical
marks)

I have also found that I need to limit my typing width to about 4-1/2"
which will ensure that, even if I just type merrily away and let the
word-wrap feature of my word processor function, the line-length will be
restricted to the usual 80 characters which should fit on everyone's screen.

Hope this helps -- I've gotten (oops, sorry -- become) pretty good at
reading and visually ignoring the =20 at the end of some lines! And
that's easier than the example you show!

Joyce Conklin            jconkli@ed.co.sanmateo.ca.us
Hillsdale High School
San Mateo, CA

>>What am I suppposed to do when I receive text which looks like this:
>>
>>AAAAAAD///8CBAAAAC0BAwAEAAAABgEBACIBAAAkA48AOP3jDhP91g7s/MYOxPy4Dpv8qQ5x/JsO

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