html mail and odd characters

[George McNinch]

Hi--

I'm sure that this question is silly -- probably I have just not
correctly understood something. But... well, maybe someone can set me
straight.

The following *often* happens that when I receive certain html emails
(presumably composed by exchange or so?).  Gnus (I guess it must be shr
these days) renders the text of the email fine -- it looks completely
normal.
 
But when I copy -- using the mouse -- some part of the email (say, to
add something to my calendar), the resulting text has "funny" characters
embedded in it.

e.g. I snipped the following text from such an email. The text has a
whitespace character which shows up as an underscore (and not in the
standard "foreground color") when I paste it into another emacs buffer:

  WEDNESDAY, February 22,  9:00 – 10:00 AM

(I see this underscore immediately after the characters "22,". Though as
I said, when this text is part of the body of an email, I don't see it.)

Well, I guess those odd characters don't really hurt me -- they are just
annoying.

I can make this particular problem go away by discouraging html mail
using code like:

(eval-after-load "mm-decode"
 '(progn 
      (add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/html")
      (add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/richtext")))

But it seems often to be better to receive html mail (e.g. links are
sometimes mangled in the plaintext version of some emails I receive) --
this solution seems more drastic than is called for.

The email from which I snipped the line above has sections:

,----
| --_000_39544A447EB7EC4E8CC8AB021AD68D730877D0C6SSVMEXDAG01MB03_
| Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
| Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
| 
| ...
| 
| --_000_39544A447EB7EC4E8CC8AB021AD68D730877D0C6SSVMEXDAG01MB03_
| Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
| Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
| 
| ...
| 
`----

When I "mm-discourage" text/html as above, I guess I see the text/plain
version of the mail, and the text found in that part doesn't have the
funny character.

It seems that "W M v" -- i.e. gnus-mime-view-all-parts -- shows me all
parts, and that gives me access to the text I want (though it can be
tricky to decide for certain which one is the "good" one, since in the
article buffer I don't see the weird characters. Maybe the text/plain
part usually comes first?)

But: maybe there is an easy way to force gnus to show me only the
text/plain part of the mail by itself?

Or maybe there is some "washing" that should clean up these odd
characters? I think I've tried the washing commands -- at least, the
ones in the Article menu -- and didn't find one that corrected this
issue.

Suggestions appreciated!

best,
gm

-- 
  ,--<>----
  | George McNinch <gmcninch at gmail.com>
  | http://gmcninch.math.tufts.edu
  `--<>----