[quote user="Correlator"]If you don't get such messages too often, save it into a file with extension *.b64 and then use, for example, WinZip to "open" it. WinZip will show its contents as a couple of text files. One of them will be your message in plain text format, which you can extract and read in Notepad etc.[/quote]

 Thanks!  Your suggestion works.

It is an adequate workaround because I only receive these problem emails occasionally.

 cheers,

george.

I occasionally receive emails from Korea.  They often show as completely blank in Pegasus (incl 4.41).

The sender's name also displays as blank.

It seems to be the issue of character encoding.

For instance, the sender is encoded in the raw email as:

   From: =?ks_c_5601-1987?B?sce/68iv?= <xxxx@etri.re.kr>

The body of the email is encoded as :

------------------------------
------=_NextPart_000_4D58_01C7923A.5617FE80
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: text/plain;
    charset="ks_c_5601-1987"


------=_NextPart_000_4D58_01C7923A.5617FE80
Content-Type: text/html;
    charset="ks_c_5601-1987"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

PERJViBpZD1tc2dib2R5IHN0eWxlPSJGT05ULVNJWkU6IDEwcHQ7IEZPTlQtRkFNSUxZOiCxvLiy
Ij4NCjxESVY+RGVhciBTdXNhbiw8L0RJVj4NCjxESVY+Jm5ic3A7PC9ESVY+DQo8RElWPkkgd291

..... truncated for brevity
------------------------------

Now the content of the encoded body is not korean native language.  It is english.

I know because I can forward the email to HOTMAIL and view the english content OK.

I the past, I would forward these unviewable emails to HOTMAIL where I could view them, and then forward them
back to my normal email account.  HOTMAIL reencoded them in a way which made them viewable in pmail.

 
However, HOTMAIL has now been changed (to something called "windows live hotmail") and no longer
does the reencoding, so I am stuck with copy-paste from the HOTMAIL window.

Is there a possible fix in pmail to fix this issue ?

cheers,

George.

[quote user="gvokalek"]

I occasionally receive emails from Korea.  They often show as completely blank in Pegasus (incl 4.41).
...
Is there a possible fix in pmail to fix this issue ?

[/quote]

Wouldn't it be better to fix the problem where it's really happening - in the sender's mail program? If the body is English text, then the headers should not be specifying a Korean encoding.

Pegasus Mail has only fairly limited handling for non-western orthography, and while it can handle a pretty wide range of character sets, it can't handle absolutely everything that's out there. It's also heavily dependent on the headers for the message accurately reflecting the content. If the sender is sending you English text, then he should also be specifying a suitable encoding for that, such as US-ASCII or one of the ISO-8859 character sets.

-- David --

 

[quote user="David Harris"]

Wouldn't it be better to fix the problem where it's really happening - in the sender's mail program? If the body is English text, then the headers should not be specifying a Korean encoding.

Pegasus Mail has only fairly limited handling for non-western orthography, and while it can handle a pretty wide range of character sets, it can't handle absolutely everything that's out there. It's also heavily dependent on the headers for the message accurately reflecting the content. If the sender is sending you English text, then he should also be specifying a suitable encoding for that, such as US-ASCII or one of the ISO-8859 character sets.

-- David --

 

[/quote]

Dear David,

thanks for explaining.  You are right that it would be better to fix the problem at the sending end, but that is not a practical solution.  I only occasionally receive one or two emails from individuals, and it does not merit following up with each one to fix their mailer.

An acceptable workaround for me would be to save the email to a file.txt, then use some sort of viewer to read the english text.   If anyone reading this knows of a suitable viewer, please post a followup.

cheers,

George.

 

A quick workaround to view the English part of the e-mail can be as simple as switching to raw view (click fourth tab in the viewer, or press Backspace). This would obviously work only if the sender does not use MIME for their messages. Even HTML can be half-readable this way. I hope this might be of some use. Good luck.

Correction. Sorry, I clearly was not paying attention to the original question which clearly stated that the message was base64 encoded. If you don't get such messages too often, save it into a file with extension *.b64 and then use, for example, WinZip to "open" it. WinZip will show its contents as a couple of text files. One of them will be your message in plain text format, which you can extract and read in Notepad etc.