?s appearing in received messages using Outlook 2003

[wf360]

When my CEO receives email from me (I use a Mac, using the Mail program), she
sees a ? in between each sentence I write. It appears like this:

This is a test. ? This is a test. ? This is a test.

To fix the problem on the specific email, she needs to go to View, Encoding
and change it to one of the "Western" encodings. (I forget the exact names;
something like Western ISO and Western Microsoft).

The question is, how does she set her DEFAULT encoding to "Western" so she
does not have to do this on each and every email I send her? Or is there
another fix (other than me ditching my Mac!)?

Thanks!

 

[Pat Willener]

It is the responsibility of the sender (you!) to set the encoding
correctly. Check Help on the mail client you are using on how to set the
character encoding of outgoing messages (the encoding you want is
ISO-8859-1).

 

[wf360]

Pat, thanks so much for that. Unfortunately, like my CEO's PC where she can
only change the encoder on a per message basis, so can I (when sending). I
cannot default to anything other than 'Automatic.' Furthermore, only my CEO
and one or two more users see these ?s between my sentences. People with
other versions of XP or Vista don't seem to have a problem.

I would love to fix this on my end but I'm not sure it's possible. Any
other ideas?

Thank you in advance!

Jay

 

[Pat Willener]

What encoding are you (or your mail client) actually sending out messages?

At the end it is you who must fix the problem, even if you must specify
the encoding manually for every outgoing message. But it is hard to
believe that there is a mail client that does not allow the default
encoding for outgoing messages.

To illustrate how it is the sender's responsibility to encode messages
correctly: if you send a message containing multibyte characters (e.g.
Japanese), then if you don't specify a valid Japanese encoding (e.g.
ISO-2022-JP), then the message will arrive at its destination as pure
garbage. No amount of encoding change at the destination will put the
garbage back to Japanese.