[Nmh-workers] Too Many Question marks when Reading a Message

[Martin G. McCormick]

        After our institution upgraded it's mailer to a newer
version of Outlook, I have been seeing a bunch of
messages containing extraneous ? (Question Marks and it's
probably due to 8-bit characters.

        Here is some text taken from a message I recently
received. There are not supposed to be any ? characters in it
but apparently something in the richtext can not be resolved so
is  producing these question marks. Text follows:

EMAIL SUBJECT: New Copier Static IP Address
EMAIL BODY: Current Settings:
Canon1BFF2E.cordell.okstate.edu 2C?9EFC1BFF2E? 139.78.66.215?
IP: 139.78.66.
?215?

End of quoted text
        I did check my locale and made sure it is appropriate
for US English and it is. The message is sent in base64 which
used to be no problem to read.

        As a computer user who is blind, I use synthetic speech
to read messages so 8-bit characters do absolutely nothing to
augment the reading experience. Generally, they are a grand
nuisance causing either extraneous punctuation to be heard as
the system tries to make 7-bit sense of things or you don't hear
certain characters because they are not resolving correctly
although they probably show up on the screen just fine. They are
not normal letters and numbers.

        In this case, they are actually showing up as question
marks right on the screen. To provide this example, I simply
used the screen utility in unix and took an ASCII screen shot of
the offending text.

        Any ideas as to how to best force the richtext to be a
bit poorer and more legible is appreciated.

Martin McCormick