Every now and then someone in my company gets an email in Japanese sent via a web based system (like Yahoo). The text is unreadable garabage. This does not happen when it is sent from another Outlook client. Anyone know what might cause the inconsistency?
Just a WAG here, but I am thinking web client emails may be using a different Japanese font than the one used by Outlook. The Standard MS Japanese font is called MS Mincho. Also browsers will use the an asian language pack that is separate from the Outlook font.
Something you might consider, does the client sending or recieving use Word as their email editor? It may be possible there is a font disparity. For example, te people who both use Outlook may be using Word as ther editor so the MS Mincho font is being used by both parties. However, the people using the web based email are using the other font as part of the browser’s asian language pack. This pack may not be installed on the recieving client’s system if they do not have it installed for their browser.
Just an idea.
Font isn’t the problem, encoding is. There are three types of Japanese character encoding commonly used - EUC, JIS (ISO-2022) and Shift-JIS. This information is supposed to be in the e-mail header, but it can be incorrect or missing if you use a mail client that doesn’t support Japanese, like the Yahoo US mail system.
If you’re reading message with an incorrect header on a web client, you can force your browser to interpret it as a certain encoding. Just go to “View” -> “Encoding” and try all three Japanese encoding methods. I’m afraid I don’t know how to do this in Outlook.
As for sending a proper Japanese e-mail from a web-based mail system, I think the easiest solution would be to sign up for a Yahoo! Japan mail service (http://mail.yahoo.co.jp/). That’s what I do, anyway.
As scr4 points out, the encoding is the problem. Unfortunately, Yahoo does not use an “enctype” parameter in their email form, meaning that an email submitted will be assumed to be in the default encoding of the server. A Japanese browser will default to EUC or Shift_JIS, so unless (again, as scr4 points out) a yahoo.co.jp server is used, the body of the email will be turned into junk.
Outlook always includes a content-type/charset header in outbound emails, so MIME compliant email readers will properly render the Japanese.
It’s definitely encoding… usually changing your viewing encoding to Shift-JIS will do it, although yesterday I had to change it to UTF-8.
Here’s an all-purpose reference on how to manage Japanese localization in Windows XP.
http://home.comcast.net/~kagamix2/xp-compatible/japanese_setting.html