Hey mark!

 ml> they all have the byte counts i stated... i don't care what
 ml> symbols or characters they are...

Except that they are mostly wrong, both the byte counts as well as the cp437
characters displayed.

 ml> this link is of the original message as viewed on my screen...

It is wrong.  The last trailing byte of the Euro symbol is correct but the
leading byte as well as the other two trailing bytes are wrong, not to mention
there is one too many trailing bytes.  As for the other 7 it is getting the
leading bytes correct (0xc5) and I am not sure about the trailing bytes.  Also
it seems to have missed one group of characters - I see only 7 whereas there
should be 8 total - which might explain why the byte counts are wrong.

 ml> this link is of the original as viewed with GoldEd's "info" view
 ml> which includes hex dumps...

Excellent.  The hex dumps are correct.  The so-called CP437 characters don't
all correspond to the 8 bit codes.  Something is wrong.

 ml> it will really trip you out (as it did me) because it does not
 ml> depict the ones with the tilde "~" as three byte entities like
 ml> they are displayed...

Which is correct.  There is no tilde "~".  What is the format of the message? 
My best guess is there is some bad leakage being caused by binary data in the
file format.  I've seen that happen before.

 ml> have fun :)

I believe that is the goal.  Thank you for the screenshots.

Life is good,
Maurice

... Don't cry for me I have vi.
--- GNU bash, version 4.4.12(1)-release (x86_64-bonnell-linux-gnu)