Your ``funny characters'' are the famous ``quoted printable'' codes, that
stand for non-english (generally) characters such as french letters that
have an accent
over them (e.g., accent a que), or german letters that include an umlaut
over them. To assure these letters go safely through email, they are coded
by using what looks like three character codes: first the equal sign (=),
then what looks
like two ``ordinary'' characters, whose ascii value is below 128. A typical
code might be: =E9
The ``ordinary'' letters after the equal sign stand for 2 hexagonal digits
-- the character code for the foreign letter. You can ungarble these codes
in a couple of ways, depending on the software you use to read mail: If
your software has
the ability to decode MIME encoded messages (usually used to send pictures,
and other binary data by mail), MIME knows how to translate these codes into
characters. Alternately your software may have ``transliteration tables''
(e.g., Eudora has both transliteration and MIME), which automatically
translate certain characters into other characters. In that case, choose
the ``US-ASCII'' transliteration table which translates quoted printable
codes into near english equalivalents. Worse comes to worse, use some type
of search and replace function to delete or replace all 3 character
sequences that start with =. For
instance, in the Unix, Dos, Linux (etc.) vi editor you could edit the
message
thus:
s/=[^ ][^ ]//g
This will replace all 3 character sequences that start with = and are
followed by two non-space characters with nothing. There may be some mail
software or
standalone programs that are specifically designed to strip out quoted
printable codes.