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From: John Kl=?iso8859-4?Q?=BA?=tnieks <John.Kletnieks@example.com>
Is this person's name really: John Kleekwals-question- mark-iso-eighty-eight-fifty-nine-dash-four-question-mark-kyoo-question- mark-equals-bah-question-mark-equals-tun-ieks ?
Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple.
Here in the US, we all learn the alphabet at a young age, but in some other countries, they don't. Not having learned the alphabet correctly, the insist on writing by making strange doodles or by putting squiggles over regular letters.
More seriously, the key is that foreign alphabets have characters that don't exist in the standard US-ASCII character set.
In the name above, the portion =?iso8859-4?Q?=BA?= is the RFC 2047 method of encoding foreign characters in the headers of email messages.
The iso8859-4 portion indicates that the remainder specifies characters defined by the International Standards Organization's standard number 8859 character set number 4. The Q?=BA portion indicates that this encodes one character, character number 186 (0xBA in hex) in the character set specified by the first portion.
The ISO 8859-4 character set is the North European character set. It contains characters used in Estonian, Baltic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, and Lappish, also known as the Latin4 character set.
Character number 186 in the Latin4 character set happens to look like the US-ASCII character e with a bar over it.
And people in other countries, they find this intuitive and easy to read?
Well, no. Typically, they are using software that lets them type in their native language automatically translating to what you saw, and displays what you saw in their native language.
With the right software, the =?iso8859-4?Q?=BA?= gibberish is completely behind the scenes and never seen by the user. But, unfortunately, not everyone has such software (and the needed fonts), and gets exposed to the gibberish.
Someday we will all see what was intended, but until then, just think of it as "stories to tell the grandchildren about".
Copyright 2001-2005 Jeff Weisberg for inettechexpert.com
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