Character settings

[fschodt]

Hi, All.  

I have an arcane question that may not be answerable, but one never knows! :-)

I have used PBM for many years, and I do a lot of emailing back and forth with Japan, in Japanese.  One problem I have is that sometimes, for some reason I don't understand, the messages I send in Japanese turn into garbage, but only when I am replying to a sender who has sent me an email in Japanese. It only happens when replying to specific senders.  When I reply to the senders, not using "reply" but copying their email into a new email in PBM and send it out, there is no problem. So what I try to do is to always write the email in Japanese and then hit the timer button on PBM;  that places the email in the outbox where I can check to see if the characters are still intact.  But of course, I have to copy the email before I do that, or everything is lost. This is a bit of a pain in the neck, which is the reason for this post. 

I've tried a variety of settings on PBM, most of which don't seem to work.  The ones that work best have been the following. I'm not sure where I got them, but someone must have given them to me at one point, because I'm not an expert on this matter. 

JIS-AutoDetect: Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, or ISO 2022 JP to Unicode for inbound (import text files)\

and 

IS-2022-JP:JIS x 0201, 0208 in ISO 2022 form, Japanese for outbound.

Encoding style for High ASCII is 8bit

and "Covert US-ASCII to ISO-8859-1 when displaying message"  is checked.\

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks much!  

Fred

[dgh]

1. Have you tried UTF-8 for outbound? Either with or without 8-bit (I don't trust mail paths to be fully 8-bit from end to end, so I always use quoted printable when high ascii characters present).

2. If you look at the raw POP file of incoming messages that give you bad outgoing characters, what do the headers say for the character encoding?

[fschodt]

Hi, David.  

One thing I think is happening is that when people send me email with the following setting, my responses seem to fall apart. 

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"   

I have tried UTF-8 for outbound, and had no luck, but I haven't tried shifting between 8-bit checked and not checked, as you suggest. so I should try that. 

Thanks much, as always, David!

Fred

[fschodt]

Hi, David. 

I tried without 8-bit, and it seems to work on one problematic email.  Over the next few days, I'll be able to test it out more, but your solutions may be the right one.  Can't thank you enough.  I have it set to "quoted printable always."  Is that what you use?  Is there a difference between "quoted printable always" and "when high ascii characters present"?

Thanks much!

Fred

On Monday, December 15, 2014 6:25:23 PM UTC-8, dgh wrote:

[fschodt]

I'm the guy who always has character setting issues.  :-)

Thanks to the great advice received before, I have had success with the main body of the email. It displays Japanese text with no problem.  I have discovered a problem with the subject line, however.  It seems to receive Japanese text with no problem.  And when I send Japanese text from my side, there seems to be no problem.  But if I receive an email with Japanese text in the subject line and then reply to that email, then the Japanese text in the subject line of the header often gets garbled, and looks more like Chinese than Japanese. Note that there is no problem now with the main body of the text, which was a problem before I incorporated David's kind advice.

Any advice for someone not very sophisticated in these matters?  I've attached a screenshot of my current character settings.