letter replaced with ë é è

[Stig]

hello, i have a strange thing with Outlook 2007.

When a plain text message is received in Outlook 2007, the é or è or à
shows in the message as ë or é or è and i don't get it right..

The mail message itself is correct, because when i sent it to other
email clients, they all show the é à è correct.

How can i correct this annoying outlook 2007 behaviour?

thank you!

 

[Pat Willener]

What is the encoding of these incoming messages?

What format of PST file do you use (97-2002 or Unicode)?

 

[Stig]

Hello Pat,
where can i check the format of my pst file?
I right clicked the personal folders, properties but i cannot see the
format of my pst file.
not after clicking the advanced button either.

when i check the headers of the mail message, i see this:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
format=flowed;
charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original

 

[Pat Willener]

In Outlook, right-click on the personal folders file(s), then select
Properties, tab General, Advanced button. Format on this panel will say
"Personal Folders File" (=Unicode) or "Personal Folders File (97-2002)".
This is for Outlook 2003, but 2007 will probably be similar.

Now the three character combinations you mention correspond to 0xC3AB,
0xC3A9, 0xC3A8. This appears to be some kind of UTF encoding, and I
found some conversion tables that convert 0xC3AB -> 0xEB = ë; 0xC3A9 ->
0xE9 = é; 0xC3A8 -> 0xE8 = è.

What I *think* is that the sending email client got the encoding wrong;
specifying charset="iso-8859-1", but encoding the characters in UTF
format. Do you know what the sending email client is, and is it always
the same?

 

[Stig]

yes, it says Personal Folders File

the sending email client is Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.5512
in this case.

But it happens also when receiving a text mail which is created from
an asp page on a IIS6 machine (sent via the IIS SMTP server).

thank you for your help

 

[Pat Willener]

I can understand encoding mismatches when created by an ASP, but Outlook
Express should be able to create consistently encoded mail messages.

Can you have either or both the Outlook Express sender and the ASP
explicitly specifying UTF-16 encoding? (I believe that the codes we are
seeing are UTF-16.) The OE sender could also try UTF-8, to see if the
characters get differently encoded. (But ISO-8859-1 is basically
correct, so I don't understand what OE is doing.)