E-mails received with funny characters

[Guest]

People are receiving my e-mails with extra characters in the e-mail. The
extras are always capital B & J and small squares and the right parenthetical
mark. They appear to be randomly placed in the e-mail. I have never heard of
this and don't have a clue as to the reason. Any help would be much
appreciated.

 

[Pat Willener]

That sounds like JIS encoding to me. Are you sending these messages?
What encoding do you specify? Are you sending this from a Japanese
Windows or Outlook system? What version of Outlook are you using?

 

[Clark]

Do you add anything to your e-mails, like smiley faces or something similar?

Clark

 

[Guest]

I am using Outlook XP 2002 version. It is not a Japanese computer.

The only graphic I add is one that is associated with the signature that I
have created in Word.

 

[Pat Willener]

These extra characters are at the beginning and at the end of each line?
This is definitely JIS (ISO-2022-JP).

- does it appear in every message you send?
- how do you create these messages?
- what message format do you use?
- what is the encoding you use?

 

[Guest]

These extra characters appear almost always at the beginning and end of each
line but also occasionally in the text.

They do not appear in every message so far only two people have informed me
of that and several other people I have sampled do not get these characters.

I create the messages using Outlook for my e-mail but I think that actually
means that I am using Word.

I'm not sure I understand the question about message format. I do send in
HTML.

I do not believe that I am using any encoding but I may not understand that
question either.

Now stranger and stranger----I was sent back an e-mail early on that
contained the letters B & J and the small square and the parenthetical mark.
This is the one that first brought this to my attention. This AM I got that
same message returned to me from the same person with different comments and
it now only contained the letters B & J and the parenthetical mark BUT NOT
THE SMALL SQUARES.

 

[Clark]

Maybe you are using a font they don't have so when it tries to adjust the
strange characters appear.

Clark

 

[Pat Willener]

The small squares are not important - they just appear instead of
unprintable characters.

Message format is HTML; what font(s) are you normally using?

Encoding: if you use Word as your email editor, then you cannot usually
see (or even change) the encoding. Can you temporarily switch off Word
as your editor, then go into Sent Items, and check the encoding of one
of your sent messages? (View, Options, section Internet Headers; it
should be a line that contains something like
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

What does the charset contain in your case?

P.S. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO-2022 for details about JIS
encoding.

 

[Guest]

I disabled Word as the e-mail editor and went to Sent mail. I tried several
e-mails and the results are the same. Under the options screen the section
entitled Internet Headings is completely blank and is dark grey in color.

The font I use when Word is the default is Arial 10 pt.

 

[Pat Willener]

Since Internet headers in Sent Items are not visible (I think that
happens when using Exchange Server), we need to look it up when
composing an outgoing message (still with Word off; Format, Encoding).

Do you type all text from the keyboard, or do you copy/paste, e.g. from
character map?

 

[Guest]

When I try that while composing an e-mail all I get under encoding is the
option, which is checked, AUTO SELECT.

I type all characters using keyboard.

 

[Pat Willener]

This is funny - I do not have an AUTO SELECT option on my Outlook
(2003); I can only select a specific encoding, e.g. Western European
(ISO). I recommend you do the same, or Unicode (UTF-8) if you use any
multibyte characters.

But it would still be *very* interesting to know in what encoding the
recipients of your messages have received these; can you try to ask
someone to look at the headers?