How to strip edit characters

[4680]

Occasionally I receive mail from others which contains editing
characters such as backspace(^H).  When this text is printed to the
screen it appears fine, but when I try to edit it, I see all the edit
characters like sew^H^Ho (instead of "so").

Is there a "shell" way to remove the backspace characters, yet retain
the text in its final form?

One method I have successfully used on a graphics terminal is to cat
the file to the screen, and then use copy/paste from a window manager
to paste the final text into a new file.  This is ok, but I don't
always have access to a graphics workstation.

Any solutions?

-- 
Eric Magnusson
ejmag at aplcen.apl.jhu.edu