Unable to change encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) manually in Hotmail

[SnowBerry]

I encountered a hotmail encoding problem recently and I think this is
probably a common problem but I have not find any info or solution
about it. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I have sent emails with extended characters such as French or Polish to
my newly created hotmail account. The content of the emails are in html
and the charset is set to "UTF-8". When I viewed my email in IE, I
found the characters were garbled and the encoding in IE was "Western
European (ISO)". So I manually change the encoding (in IE7, select
"Page > Encoding > Unicode (UTF-8)"). The problem is, the page did get
reloaded but the encoding remained the same as "Western European
(ISO)". As a result, the characters are still garbled. In another word,
Hotmail does not allow me to change the encoding to "Unicode (UTF-8)".
When I viewed the html source code, I find a script function called
Ifutf8(). It catches the encoding and do something if the encoding is
utf8, though I am not able to tell exactly what it tries to do. I
wonder if this function is the reason for this problem.

I have tried to change the encoding to others such as Chinese
Simplified or Korean, all of them are updated as expected, no problem
at all.

Both IE6 and IE7 behave exactly the same.

Another weird issue is that when I sent the same emails to my another
hotmail account I created long time ago, I don't have the problem above
at all. Both of my hotmail accounts were created in English and the
location is Canada.

Thanks in advance!


SnowBerry

 

[Pat Willener]

I do not understand how this problem is related to Outlook - are you
accessing your Hotmail account with Outlook? If so, what is all this
mentioning of IE6 and IE7? Please clarify.

 

[SnowBerry]

It is just because I could not find a Hotmail discussion group. I have
found some discussion on Hotmail in this group and that is why. I used
IE to view those hotmail messages.

Thanks,

Snow Berry

 

[Pat Willener]

I see. The thing with encoding is that an email client like Outlook will
show individual messages in the encoding that they are sent. However, a
web-based client works completely different, as the encoding is usually
fixed per page.

I would contact Hotmail support with your question.