[X-Apps] Strange mail characters in Entourage

[Allen Watson]

On Thu, 1 May 2003 01:00:46 -0700, Mark Singh <macfan at telus.net> wrote:

> I've been seeing a lot of strange characters lately in my emails.
> Usually it's when I see my original email in a friend's reply. All my
> apostrophe's have been converted to commas, and double-quotes are
> either 2 commas in succession or a percentage sign.
>
> Is this an Entourage related bug, is one the mail servers messing up
> special characters??
>
> Any info would be appreciated.
>
This is an incompatibility between Mac and Windows character sets for curly
quotes and apostrophes when using HTML mail, and a problem in your friend's
Windows computer, which is not indicating the correct "character set" when
replying to your mail. First of all, he/she is almost certainly seeing the
correct characters on his machine; it's the reply that is screwed up. I do
not know if there is any way it can be corrected on the Windows end, but at
your end, if you select "Format->Character Set->Western European(Windows)",
you will see your message displayed with the correct characters in the
reply. This is what your correspondent's mail program should have indicated
in the message headers to inform Entourage how to display things.

To avoid the problem entirely, turn off "Replace straight quotes with smart
quotes" in "Tools->AutoCorrect" AutoFormat. Or, send plain text instead of
HTML (there are no curly quotes in plain text).

-- 
Allen <allenwatson at earthlink.net>
Scripts for OE and Entourage:
<http://members.thinkaccess.net/allenwatson@thinkaccess.net/Scripts/>
Entourage questions: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>