Very off topic

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

A couple of posters are getting this in their replies and postings to me ' One uses Windows 7, the other Bluemail for Windows.

Anybody got an idea what this is all about?

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

What what is all about? You don't say what its supposed to be they are getting so how can we know what they get if we don't get it? Brian

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

This in their emails.

'

[Andy Burns]

emails?

It's html-speak for an apostrophe, shouldn't be using html here in the first place.

[Paul]

Do you have the <MID> of the defective posting, so it can be popped into Howard for a look ?

The message you posted just now, doesn't look like there's HTML in it.

Maybe you're using another tool, or, you changed settings, or, you *replied* to some individual who posts in HTML+Text.

In this example from another poster, you can see the extra materials in an HTML posting. Maybe one of your postings, had stuff like this in it.

"Content-Type: multipart/alternative;"

Paul

[Martin Brown]

Their email client has encoded it as HTML/XML escapes and your client is not decoding it again so you see literal HTML for special characters.

That is a guess based on your garbled description of the symptoms.

Send them an email that contains <>'& and see what happens.

[John Rumm]

Interestingly, that actually substitutes the proper character for the html escape sequence, even though he actually typed it in full in the body of the message. (i.e. it shows on the web site as an apostrophe rather than the ampersand prefixed string.

[John Rumm]

Post a message here with a single quote ' character in it...

It might be that Outlook Express is treating it as a special character and sending it in its HTML escaped format[1], and the software on the receiving end is not reversing that escaping correctly. Or it might be that its sending it normally, but its being shown in escaped format by the receiving software.

(possibly more likely because OE does not include a "Content-Transfer-Encoding" statement in the message header, which helps give a bit more information to the receiving software on how stuff should be interpreted).

[1] In the text of web pages (and OE makes heavy use of web standards even for email/news), some characters have a special meanings and so need to be sent in a special way when you want to include them in your message and not have them have their special meanings. This is called "escaping" basically sending a specially formatted "code" to replace the character in question.

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

Thanks to all that replied.

[Tim Streater]

I think it would need to include a:

Content-Type: text/html

header rather than Content-Transfer-Encoding. The latter just tells whether the content is plain-text (7bit, in which case it can probably be omitted anyway), or quoted-printable encoding, or base64 encoding.