On Nov 23, 2012, at 6:10 PM, Jeffjendro at aol.com wrote:

> When I receive messages texted to Tweeters from phones I end up with a bunch of gibberish on the ABA access to Tweeters.

The messages are emailed from smartphones not texted. It seems to be neither provider or phone specific.

On Nov 23, 2012, at 6:46 PM, Barbara Deihl wrote:

> I, too, occasionally notice a totally illegible message on the ABA "WA Tweeters" site - most recently I recall a post from Tom Mansfield that was unending capital and lower-case letters. There's probably some trick that will fix the problem, but most likely people will have to accomplish it on their phones. I'm no techie, so I have no idea about a solution - hopefully other Tweets or some list administrator will get on this. Thanks for bringing it up.

It's not a TWEETERS problem it's ABA "WA Tweeters" site bug.

http://birding.aba.org/maillist/WA

They're not dealing with the text encoding correctly used in the email. They seem to assume that text/plain part of the MIME message is just plain text they can drop into their site. In fact it can have Content Transfer Encoding of base64 that needs to be decoded. That's the "gobbledygook" that's seen. Mail clients know to deal with this -- so should deal with it in their web app.

Interesting that other aggregation sites don't post the message too. I presume they're not dealing with that encoding either but recognize it as "not text" so drop the message. e.g. Tom Mansfield message doesn't appear at http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Tweeters

Those affected should email ABA and ask them to fix it (include my technical point above).
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Kevin Purcell (Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA)
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