Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Prevent odd characters in emails from Mail to Outlook' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Prevent odd characters in emails from Mail to Outlook
Authored by: thg on Jul 19, '07 09:29:50AM
There's nothing wrong with having A0's in text. They are just "no-break spaces." The ? results because Outlook reads them using the wrong encoding. It's part of a more general problem where Outlook bugs cause certain kinds of rich text (= html, not .rtf) sent by Mail to display with Chinese or other garbled characters. For details of how this happens and other possible fixes see

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/woutlook.html

[ Reply to This | # ]
Related question
Authored by: hamarkus on Jul 19, '07 11:26:53AM

Very detailed explanation, thanks. A stupid question, how does any application opening a pure text file know which text encoding was used. I guess .doc .rtf and other formats have headers, tags and other metadata for that. But a pure text file? I sometimes have the feeling the app can only guess (or do these checks what the first two bytes are).



[ Reply to This | # ]
Related question
Authored by: thg on Jul 19, '07 11:53:26AM

There may be programs that can guess at the encoding of plain text by analysing the bytes they contain, but generally there is no way to know what the encoding is. So most apps let you select an encoding in the Open dialogue. An exception to this is plain text which has a Byte Order Mark (BOM) as the very first character. All modern apps will know that this is a form of Unicode and should interpret it correctly.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Prevent odd characters in emails from Mail to Outlook
Authored by: Fairly on Jul 20, '07 10:11:20PM

Exactly. A0 is simply  . Don't ever count on Outlook being compatible with anything. This isn't your problem - it's Microsoft's. As always.



[ Reply to This | # ]