strange characters in email

[stephen]

This is my first time to these forums so hopefully this post is in the right
location.

My issue is with Microsoft Outlook.

* There are to people here in the office receiving emails from China.
* The emails are being written in English by the Chinese sender.
* When the emails arrive here in Sydney though, one of the users received
the email exactly as it was sent, but the other user is receiving the email
with Chinese characters all through it.
* The strange thing though is that the Chinese sender can send two email one
after the other but only one of them may come through with the characters.

We have tried changing the encoding etc, it gets rid of the chinese
characters but leaves spaces and question marks everywhere.

Any ideas on how to resolve this?

Thanks in advance
Stephen

 

[Pat Willener]

A few questions:
- are the messages sent to the two users the same or different messages?
- what is the encoding used by the sender?
- what message type, and if HTML or RTF, what font is used?
- what is the Outlook setup of the two recipients (Outlook version,
account type, PST file format, etc)?

 

[stephen]

Thanks for the quick reply Pat.

* It is the same email being sent to one user and cc to the other user.
* Not sure on the encoding of the sender, there are several of them in
china. I can email them to find out.
* I believe the format is HTML and the font is the outloko default.
*The two users I am comparing both use Microsoft Outlook 2003 w sp2. It is a
pop3 email account running on fedora.

I am pretty certain it is something localised to the one users workstation
as there are several people in this office at different levels of office and
service packs but only this one is effected.

I hope this helps.

Regards
Stephen

 

[Pat Willener]

Stephen,

You can find the sender's message encoding when you open the received
message, View, Options, look for a line 'Content-Type:', then examine
the 'charset=' content.

To find the font the message was sent with, temporarily reply to the
message, then place the cursor into the original message text. You
should see the font name in the standard toolbar.

If it is a Chinese font, it is possible that one user has it installed,
the other one not.

But there are still several more possibilities, e.g. ASCII-type vs.
Unicode-type PST file. But let's first wait for the two above answers.

 

[Pat Willener]

Hi Stephen,

It looks like the sender does not specify an encoding. But the message
uses 'multipart', which means it is most probably sent by Outlook.

Multipart means that the message is sent in multiple formats, e.g. HTML
and Plain Text. But what does that mean? One user sees the HTML
portion, and the other one the Plain Text?

This is very confusing. Are these messages confidential? If not, would
it be possible that you could forward me one of these messages for analysis?

 

[Pat Willener]

I think this too is related to the 'multipart' format of the message.
But which - so far - does not actually explain anything...

 

[stephen]

Hi Pat,

I have been given the ok to forward you one of the suspicious emails. Would
still be more comfortable though emailing it to you rather then posting it.
Would you mind giving me your email address.

Thanks
Stephen

 

[Pat Willener]

Hi Stephen,

I leave this up to you if you want to post the entire message as an
attachment to this newsgroup (where email addresses may be harvested by
spammers), or forward it to me. If you send it to me, use Insert -> Item
to insert the full message as an attachment. I will post the result of
my analysis here (if I, hopefully, find any result). My address - with
spaces in it: p w i l l e n e r @ c i n c o m . c o m

 

[stephen]

Hi Pat,

I emailed you this morning with one of the troublesome emails.

Hope that hleps

Regards
Stephen

 

[Pat Willener]

Analyzing the message you've sent me last week I found that the original
message from China was sent with an encoding "GB2312" (Chinese
simplified). This is obviously the wrong encoding for an English
language message. The result of incorrect encoding is unpredictable, as
was in the case of your two users.

When a Chinese (or other multibyte) encoding is specified, the email
client tries to find the appropriate double-byte characters in the
message body. Certain combination will just fit to make a Chinese
character out of it.

Why one user got this result, and the other user a different result, we
will probably never know. Just have the sender specify correct encoding
(ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII), and the received messages should be OK.

 

[stephen]

Hi Pat,

Thankyou for your efforts and response. I only this morning found out that
the boss has gone overseas for a few weeks now so I will email him and advise
him of what you have found.

Thankyou greatly for your help with this matter.
Regards
Stephen

 

[stephen]

Hi Pat,

Issue is finally fixed. Boss got a new laptop and the chinese characters
don't appear at all. So it was as I assumes something he had done with his
laptop that only a format will fix. Just wanted to say thanks for all the help

cheers