> On 20 Aug 2025, at 14:03, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Alban Hertroys <haramrae@gmail.com> writes:
>> Or is it just my end that turns Scott's (and only Scott's) messages into gibberish Chinese?
>
> What it looks like from here is that the message body is in UTF16:
> every other byte is zero. That gives my email client indigestion,
> too.
Actually, I think it’s misreporting the message content as UTF-16, while it is in fact encoded as UTF-8. So the error
appearsto be on the sender side.
Apparently, Apple Mail.app is rather strict about following the reported encoding, while Gmail for example does some
attemptto guess. That would explain the less terrible results with Gmail.
I can base64 decode the message just fine on the command line, which runs in a terminal emulator (Apple’s Terminal.app)
thatdoes handle UTF-8, but not UTF-16 by default.
Alban Hertroys
--
Illustratief voor het verschil tussen steek- en snijwapens:
Met mensen die een punthoofd hebben,
kun je goed de draak steken.
Met mensen die scherp zijn,
lukt dat juist slecht.
