Please answer: recepients getting weird characters
Lila Freilicher
my emails such as a 2 instead of a quote mark and EUR instead of bullet
sign. (using MS word OSX). The only thing I can think of that has changed is
the incessant continous virus attempt to get me to open attachments
(supposed sent from Microsoft and all the alerts following this from email
servers and returned mail I never sent). I was told the virus couldn't
corrupt anything unless the attachments were opened (which they were not)
and that furthermore th evirus would not affect a Mac.
Can you think of what is going on here with the crazy symbols and how I can
fix it?
Paul Berkowitz
Freilicher" <LPFMar...@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
It's nothing to do with any virus. With the exception of the bullet/euro, I
think you'll find that the "weird characters" are _not_ showing up at the
other end when you send your first message (or reply), - ask the recipient
and you'll find out. These "2" and "3" and euro characters show up only when
they are sent _back to you_ from a Windows recipient, quoted in their
replies, and then from that point on. Usually these will be for ³ and ²
curly quote marks in HTML mail.
It only happens in HTML mail, only happens in correspondence with Windows
users. Curly quotes and bullets are among the characters that aren't in the
basic alphabet & number set (just 96 characters including upper case and
lower case, including simple punctuation only, no accents or "funny
characters") called 7-bit ASCII, or "US-ASCII". Entourage is very accurate
when sending out messages that contain non-ASCII characters - unless you're
writing in a non-Western European language, the encoding that includes curly
quotes, bullets and accented characters is usually a quite-common encoding
called "ISO 8859-1".
When this message gets to the other end, and the recipient replies also in
HTML, then it should also encode in ISO 8859-1. And if you've included
accented character like ü or â or é, it will do just that. But Outlook
Windows and Outlook Express Windows, and perhaps some other Windows email
programs, are inaccurate and sloppy when it comes to curly quote marks. It
incorrectly includes them as if they were ASCII, and encodes its message
back to you as US-ASCII. Entourage takes them at their word. The trouble is
that the Windows encoding for non-ASCII characters is different than the Mac
encoding. So it comes out as 2 or 3 or 9. The bullet is a special case:
Windows has recently changed its encoding and given the former bullet
character (in Windows) to the euro.
There are 3 ways you can avoid this problem:
1) Never send HTML messages. Plain text will never have these errors, since
plain text really is US-ASCII. (You can set the Preference for Format in
both Compose and Reply in Mail & News Preferences to Plain Text).
2) You can go on sending HTML if you go to Tools/AutoCorrect/AutoFormat, and
uncheck "Replace Straight quotes with smart quotes". and "Automatic bulleted
lists", and never type a bullet.
3) Or, if you know you're sending HTML to a Windows correspondent or
receiving HTML from Windows (i.e. if you see these funny symbols), go to
Format/Character Set/Western European (Windows).
--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html
Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.
PLEASE always state which version of Entourage you are using - 2001 or X.
It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.
Ramón G Castañ
berk...@silcom.com wrote on 9/27/03 11:10 PM:
> ... It only happens in HTML mail, ...
I just replied to a similar post pointing out your reply and with the
following observation:
Also see Paul Berkowitz's excellent reply in the thread titled "Re: Please
answer: recipients getting weird characters":
He focuses on HTML messages for very valid reasons. But I've NEVER sent a
single HTML message in my entire life (and I have used computers in the
course of my works since the early 1960s), yet I have seen the same
phenomenon happen to pure-text messages I've sent out in Spanish, German,
French and, to a much lesser extent, Dutch. So it's DEFINITELY not just an
HTML thing.
What I have seen is the so-called "special characters" (they seem pretty
normal and ordinary to me) being substituted by strange codes involving a
capital F and some numbers, possibly also an equal sign (=). My
correspondents see them too. It seems to be the way their mail servers
routinely mangle up pure-text (non-HTML) messages. Some of those are Uncle
Sam servers here in the US.
Ramón
---
Please remove NOSPAM to reply privately if you are so inclined,
ramoncNOSPAM at NOSPAMsurewest dot NOSPAM netNOSPAM.
Otherwise, replies to the Newsgroup are always welcome.