MTA Relics (such as =3Dfoo) (discussion)

deprecated has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

There has been a request here to clean some character sequences out of incoming emails because we are in a publication environment and dont want to publish something like:

This line is really long blah blah blah something else foo bar=20
[download]

My understanding of this is that it is a relic from an MTA. However, since we are dealing with scientific data, we cannot simply search and zap the occurances of /=[^=]{2}/. So I gather there is an algorithm to determine when one of these needs to be added (or interpolated from what it normally is).

However, there is a slight kink to just developing an algorithm. First, we dont know what client they are actually sending the file in with (such as Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla, et cetera), and furthermore, many of these mails are being read by elm(1), which may be doing it itself.

So I'm looking for a little insight as to where these things crop up and why, and if there is a safe method for zapping them.

thanks
brother dep.

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.

Comment on MTA Relics (such as =3Dfoo) (discussion) Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: MTA Relics (such as =3Dfoo) (discussion) by merlyn (Sage) on May 02, 2001 at 20:14 UTC
This is called "quoted printable". If done properly, there's a header (content-encoding) that says it's been done, so you can trigger on that. MIME::QuotedPrint can deal with that directly, as can some of the MIME tools. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]