# Little question marks in my email **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 18, 2013, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599 "2013-10-18T19:29:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mangeorge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d78d45/32.png) [@mangeorge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mangeorge)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2013, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/1 "2013-10-18T19:29:01Z")
I’m using earthlink on my iMac. Some emails I receive, most from business etc, have question marks in little blue boxes in the message but not necessarily in the text but between sections. Some images display fine. I’ve tried help and google and all that. I’ve ignored them forever but now curiosity is killing me. Any help? Peace, mangeorge Clicking on them has no effect ---
**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2013, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/2 "2013-10-18T19:33:58Z")
I would suspect they are non displaying images, from links within the e-mail. ---
**Author:** ![arseNal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecae2f/32.png) [@arseNal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/arseNal)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2013, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/3 "2013-10-18T19:40:46Z")
I know you said blue, but does it look similar to the black diamond with question mark in it, in this link? > **[Specials (Unicode block)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block))** > > Specials is a short Unicode block of characters allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been assigned since Unicode 3.0: > U+FFFE \ and U+FFFF \ are noncharacters, meaning they are reserved but do not cause ill-formed Unicode text. Versions of the Unicode standard from 3.1.0 to 6.3.0 claimed that these characters should never be interchanged, leading some applications to use them to guess text... Unprintable character. Often an emdash or some fancy quotes. If it’s in between sections then I don’t know, maybe some kind of separator. ---
**Author:** ![mangeorge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d78d45/32.png) [@mangeorge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mangeorge)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2013, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/4 "2013-10-18T19:57:27Z")
> [@arseNal](#): > > I know you said blue, but does it look similar to the black diamond with question mark in it, in this link? > > [Specials (Unicode block) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)) > > Unprintable character. Often an emdash or some fancy quotes. If it’s in between sections then I don’t know, maybe some kind of separator. Yes it is as you say square and blue rather than diamond and black. And it’s all by itself in sections between images and text. Some apps, such as some label printers, don’t like empty spaces. ---
**Author:** ![seal\_cleaner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@seal\_cleaner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/seal_cleaner)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2013, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/5 "2013-10-19T22:39:23Z")
What is your font for email display? Try changing it. ---
**Author:** ![Digital\_is\_the\_new\_Analog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a88e4f/32.png) [@Digital\_is\_the\_new\_Analog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Digital_is_the_new_Analog)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2013, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/6 "2013-10-19T22:46:57Z")
> [@arseNal](#): > > I know you said blue, but does it look similar to the black diamond with question mark in it, in this link? > > [Specials (Unicode block) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)) > > Unprintable character. Often an emdash or some fancy quotes. If it’s in between sections then I don’t know, maybe some kind of separator. Note the link here is incorrect - the ending parenthesis needs to be included. [Fixed Link Here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)). ---
**Author:** ![mangeorge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d78d45/32.png) [@mangeorge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mangeorge)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2013, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/7 "2013-10-20T14:26:24Z")
Font is Lucida Grande. I changed it Helvetica but that had no effect. ---
**Author:** ![BobArrgh](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobarrgh/32/2881_2.png) [@BobArrgh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobArrgh)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2013, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/8 "2013-10-20T15:24:43Z")
It isn’t the font so much as it is the encoding. Digital files can be encoded in several different ways (ANSI, ISO-8859-1, US-ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc). A file encoded in a particular format needs to be decoded using the same format so that all of the characters are rendered correctly. Most characters that you see are single bytes, capable of being stored in 7 bits. However, other characters such as accented characters and other “non-English” characters are encoded in a multi-byte format, typically 3 bytes in length. What’s happening is that your email application is rendering the text using a particular encoding scheme, but which happens to be incorrect. It may not be possible to correctly render the text once it has been incorrectly rendered. That is, your email application may be showing you a single “unknown character” representation, and may be throwing out the other characters that followed the start of the Unicode sequence. You might try looking through your application options to see if you can change the encoding. Alternatively, you might try copying the text into a file and then opening that file with another application such as Notepad++, Open Office, or possibly even Microsoft Word. I just ran into this issue this week with some work I was doing, but using Notepad++ and fiddling with the encoding worked like a charm. One thing of interest that I found is that if certain encoding is applied to a text file, a series of “non-text” binary characters are put at the beginning of the file to indicate the encoding. These characters are not displayed by various editors, unless you turn on the “Show all symbol” options. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2013, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/little-question-marks-in-my-email/671599/9 "2013-10-20T16:04:55Z")
You didn’t say what email program you’re using. Different email programs use different graphical representations of email codes and badly constructed markup strings and so forth. Or, if you’re one of those webmail users and hence do not use an email program at all, it will depend on the interpretation code in use at your provider’s webmail site. Anyway ONE likely possibility is that you’re the recipient of email that has code for JPEGs and other image formats, where the referenced image files do not actually exist on the server. They do this on purpose: email is sent out with inline graphic file named _mangeorge\_10.21.13\_adnumber3.jpg_ or equivalent; the image doesn’t exist; the server records the attempted fetch and from that log the spammer knows which email ad you opened and who you are and so on, and they use that to ascertain the success of their email subject line and to record the “hits” or “clickthrus” (how many people read this email versus discarding it unread?).