scrambled jibberish emails

Factual Questions
1

I’m having trouble with international emails, to Asia and South America. Sent and received emails will be illegible, little boxes and symbols instead of letters. I would think it is my email settings but what bugs me is that I will be corresponding back and forth and suddenly, after the the third or fourth email, things will scramble and communication ceases. Also, sometimes I keep sending an email and the third or fourth one will finally get through unscrambled. I use Outlook Express. Anyone who knows more about software than me have any advice?

I got an urgent plea last night from a business associate in Asia for a Word document. The plea came through clearly but the two follow-up emails were just boxes and symbols and I assume my reply was also scrambled. I’ll try and email the document from a couple of other computers downtown today but this is very frustrating.

2

Lots of things could be wrong - -but I bet that what has happened is that you have generated a document on a machine which is set to display English characters by default (and may not have any alternative character sets loaded).

When you receive a document it may or may not have non-English characters in it. When it does, your system will fail to display them. Since English is a de-facto international language, the people you send e-mails to will probably have the English character set loaded on their machine as well as their own character set, so they can probably see your data.

There is probably a way to load Asian and South American Character sets onto your machine, but I only use Linux, so you’re on your own with Micro$oft!

3

a foolproof method would be to type your emails in a notepad text file, then send the plain text .txt file as an attachment. and have your asian friends do the same.

ofcourse, your error can be eliminated, but the info that you offer is extremely limited to be able to make a correct diagnosis.

4

Actually, attachments are also encoded in different ways so that is not foolproof.

From Outlook Express you can drag an email on to the desktop and then open it with Notepad or other word processor. You will see it is ALL text, including attachments. The header will tell you a lot, including the character set used (iso-8859-1, etc) encoding for attachgments (mime, etc)

So you have to make sure you are using the same parameters. IN OE check out tools options send international settings and plain text settings. Have your correspondent do the same.

I have a friend in China who just cannot assure doing it right. She sends me emails sometimes right and sometimes coded in Chinese and she just can’t do it right unless I explain it every time so, since I know how to decypher the emails I just live with it.

Remember an email, attachment and all are just plain text and all the information on how it is encoded is in the header. Here’s a sample:

From: “sailor” <sailorr@sailor.com>
To: “Pretty Girl” <prettygirl00@prettygirl.com>
Subject: Affidavit
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 23:55:51 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0010_01C231DB.4F3B9960"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0010_01C231DB.4F3B9960
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=“iso-8859-1”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

See if you like it

------=_NextPart_000_0010_01C231DB.4F3B9960
Content-Type: application/msword;
name=“Affidavit.doc”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=“Affidavit.doc”

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAIQAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAADSAAAAAAAAANIAAAAAAAAA0gAAAAwAAADeAAAADAAAANIAAAAAAAAATwIAALYAAAD2AAAA
AAAAAPYAAAAAAAAA9gAAAAAAAAD2AAAAAAAAAPYAAAAAAAAA9gAAAAAAAAD2AAAAAAAAAPYAAAAA
AAAAFAIAAAIAAAAWAgAAAAAAABYCAAAAAAAAFgIAAAAAAAAWAgAAAAAAABYCAAAAAAAAFgIAACQA

MANY LINES LIKE THIS DELETED

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==

------=_NextPart_000_0010_01C231DB.4F3B9960–