My copy of this message was fine. What is probably happening is that
an intermediate mail gateway (or worse: a list exploder) transforms
the mail from readable into quoted printable.
This is for instance the case for all mail received by .fr addresses:
the greeting from the exploder in Strasbourg apparently doesn't please
vger, which then reacts by transforming all mails into QP, even if
they started out readable :-( This is doubly offensive, because:
1. AFAIK, the exploder in Strasbourg _only_ serves France.
2. In France, the vast majority of (knowledgeable) users is _against_
QP. (Other countries, such as Finland and Sweden seem to be less
opposed to QP).
Complaints to the list maintainer didn't help. Indeed, zmailer's
author is radically pro-QP, and has more clout than the average list
user. For those who don't know: zmailer is the MTA which is used by
vger. Vger uses zmailer instead of sendmail, because it better
handles the load imposed by the lists.
If you don't want QP messages, do as I do: get a poboxes.com address,
and subscribe to the list through that address ;-) Yes, this somewhat
defeats the exploder system, but if enough ppl do it, maybe the
"powers that be" get the message.
Happy Linuxing,
Alain
(P.S. Actually the main reason I got a poboxes address is because I'll
be moving soon. The QP-free mailing lists were only a welcome
additional benefit ;-) )