J
John Tempest
I receive many emails in the French language, but some of these originating
from the US are wrongly marked as encoded as "us-asc" in spite of the fact
that the message contains accented characters. Outlook 2003 strips or zeros
the most significant bit with the result that messages become garbled when
displayed in Outlook. Apart from checking each message and using the Outlook
menu to change the decoding to International European (ISO), is there any
way of persuading Outlook 2003 to automatically switch decoding to ISO if it
is marked as us-asc with 8 bits? Unfortunately, my pleas to senders to
change their configuration so that emails are encoded as International
Eurpean instead of us-asc seems to fall on deaf ears, and other non-US users
seem to have email readers that properly recognise the 8 bit accented
characters!
It would also help a lot if programmers writin e-mail software also ensured
that it met national and internation standards. For instance, if characters
not in the us-asc codeset were detected by the email software sending the
email, the user should be warned that the character set is inappropriate as
according to the ANSI standard us-asc is only a seven bit character encoding
system -- if the 8th bit is set it should only relate to parity checking
which as far as I know no longer necessary in Internet transmission
protocols; and secondly the receiving email software should recognise there
is something amiss if a message marked as us-asc has any characters with the
8th bit set.
John Tempest
from the US are wrongly marked as encoded as "us-asc" in spite of the fact
that the message contains accented characters. Outlook 2003 strips or zeros
the most significant bit with the result that messages become garbled when
displayed in Outlook. Apart from checking each message and using the Outlook
menu to change the decoding to International European (ISO), is there any
way of persuading Outlook 2003 to automatically switch decoding to ISO if it
is marked as us-asc with 8 bits? Unfortunately, my pleas to senders to
change their configuration so that emails are encoded as International
Eurpean instead of us-asc seems to fall on deaf ears, and other non-US users
seem to have email readers that properly recognise the 8 bit accented
characters!
It would also help a lot if programmers writin e-mail software also ensured
that it met national and internation standards. For instance, if characters
not in the us-asc codeset were detected by the email software sending the
email, the user should be warned that the character set is inappropriate as
according to the ANSI standard us-asc is only a seven bit character encoding
system -- if the 8th bit is set it should only relate to parity checking
which as far as I know no longer necessary in Internet transmission
protocols; and secondly the receiving email software should recognise there
is something amiss if a message marked as us-asc has any characters with the
8th bit set.
John Tempest