punctuation in my emails changes after I send it. Weird.

G

gkinard

I am new to Entourage and it is driving me crazy (trying to get
Outlook Express out of my head and adapt to Entourage....arrrghhhh!).

1) I sent an email with the word CATS in quotation marks. In the
recipient's mailbox it lost the quote marks and had two commas before
CATS and a percentag marks after CATS. How can I correct this problem?

2) In my inbox, can I remove the words Today, Yesterday, etc. that
divide my emails into daily categories? I just as soon not have those
designations.

Thanks for any help you can give.
 
J

Jolly Roger

1) I sent an email with the word CATS in quotation marks. In the
recipient's mailbox it lost the quote marks and had two commas before
CATS and a percentag marks after CATS. How can I correct this problem?
Click to expand...

Did you physically type "CATS" yourself, or was it pasted text from
another document (perhaps Word)?

It sounds like the quotation marks around the word CATS were not the
standard ASCII character 34 quotation marks ("), but were instead were
extended "curly" open and close quotation marks (“, and â€). I'm not
sure what Entourage specifically does, but I can tell you most popular
Mac applications encode such extended characters as Unicode by default.
Windows, however, does *not* use Unicode, which means viewing a Unicode
message would display the symptoms you describe.

The way to prevent this in the future is to convert said text into
plain ASCII text. You can do that with TextWrangler:

<http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/>

1. Open a new, blank TextWrangler document.
2. Paste in the text.
3. From the TextWrangler menu bar, choose Edit > Select All to select
all of the text.
4. From the TextWrangler menu bar, choose Text > Convert To ASCII.
2) In my inbox, can I remove the words Today, Yesterday, etc. that
divide my emails into daily categories? I just as soon not have those
designations.
Click to expand...

From the Entourage menu bar, select View > Arrange By > Show In Groups
to disable this feature.
 
G

gkinard

Did you physically type "CATS" yourself, or was it pasted text from
another document (perhaps Word)?

It sounds like the quotation marks around the word CATS were not the
standard ASCII character 34 quotation marks ("), but were instead were
extended "curly" open and close quotation marks (", and "). I'm not
sure what Entourage specifically does, but I can tell you most popular
Mac applications encode such extended characters as Unicode by default.
Windows, however, does *not* use Unicode, which means viewing a Unicode
message would display the symptoms you describe.

The way to prevent this in the future is to convert said text into
plain ASCII text. You can do that with TextWrangler:

<http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/>

1. Open a new, blank TextWrangler document.
2. Paste in the text.
3. From the TextWrangler menu bar, choose Edit > Select All to select
all of the text.
4. From the TextWrangler menu bar, choose Text > Convert To ASCII.


From the Entourage menu bar, select View > Arrange By > Show In Groups
to disable this feature.
Click to expand...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for helping me.
To ans. your question, CATS was typed directly into Entourage email
(not copied/pasted from Word). Do I understand correctly that
everytime I write an email in Entourage I will have to do the
TextWrangler dance (because I don't know which characters will
transmit as I typed them)?

Your hint on removing the Today/Yesterday categories worked like a
charm. Thank you.
 
J

Jolly Roger

To ans. your question, CATS was typed directly into Entourage email
(not copied/pasted from Word).
Click to expand...

If you typed them directly into Entourage, this should not be
happening. A few questions for you:

Was your message a plain text message or was it formatted HTML?

Which specific keys on your keyboard did you press to type the quote
characters?

What operating system is the receiver running?

What email application is the receiver using to read your message?
 
G

gkinard

I just found, under Entourage/Format, that the HTML choice was checked
(so I unchecked it).
I used the quotation key to type the quote characters.
The person who received the email is not on Mac; am not sure which
version of Windows she is using.
The receiver is using Outlook to receive the emails.

~~~~~~~
 
D

Diane Ross

P

phill4all

I am new to Entourage and it is driving me crazy (trying to get
Outlook Express out of my head and adapt to Entourage....arrrghhhh!).

1) I sent an email with the word CATS in quotation marks. In the
recipient's mailbox it lost the quote marks and had two commas before
CATS and a percentag marks after CATS. How can I correct this problem?

2) In my inbox, can I remove the words Today, Yesterday, etc. that
divide my emails into daily categories? I just as soon not have those
designations.

Thanks for any help you can give.
Click to expand...

For both questions, I suggest you go through all the Preferences... to
set the options you prefer.

For the second one, the last option under General in Preferences is
"Use relative dates in lists (Today, Yesterday)". Simply uncheck it.

Phill
 
J

Jolly Roger

For both questions, I suggest you go through all the Preferences... to
set the options you prefer.
Click to expand...

It turns out the option for this is not found in Entourage Preferences,
but in Tools > AutoCorrect.
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Similar Threads

Quotation marks appear 1
Cross platform punctuation mis-translation 1
Error when sending/receiving email 6
Change automatic spacing after punctuation? 4
I can't add new email accounts 2
Sudden glitches with POP email accounts 5
Mail stays in my inbox after I mark it asJunk - emails won't delete 4
how to change font color in my email 1

Top