Mail to Outlook users garbles International characters

I don't know... I sent email to my PC/Outlook 2003 and it worked fine. But earlier today I sent an email to someone else and I got back garbage...
My question is - why I cannot set some encoding as the default for all outgoing emails? It's Automatic now, and I have to set it manually each time to Baltic Rim (Windows), just to be sure they will receive all Latvian characters intact... It seems that older email clients don't recognize UTF-8 properly.

Klas, I have excactly the same problem. Not only are characters changed in to chineese like characters, but whole words are also deleted.

I can even see the garbled characters when Outlook users reply to my mail. To avoid replying in Rich Text I have deselected the option of replying in same format in the settings of new messages.

I look forward to a solution to this problem from Apple.

Klas -- could you send me a test message of the type you are talking about? I would like to have a look at the details (click on my name for the address).

There are ways to try to set the default encoding. See this FAQ which was made up for some different problems:

Tom Gewecke, "kmail: Fixing Tiger Mail Encodings", 10:16pm May 10, 2005 CDT

It looks like I may need to add sections to it for some ISO charsets too, judging from this thread...

I sent an email to someone else and I got back garbage...

My question is - why I cannot set some encoding as the default for all outgoing emails?

Guntis -- when you get back garbage, it is probably the mail program at the other end which is messing up an encoding translation. Outgoing encodings do have to be somewhat automatic, to make sure garbage does not go out when the user types some character not in the default charset. But it would be a lot better if Apple had set a different default charset for various languages.

Do you have English or Latvian at the top of your System Prefs/International/Languages pane? I have not tried it, but it might default to something better than UTF-8 with Latvian at the top. Another possibility is to try and modify the default as mentioned in this FAQ for some other scripts:

Tom Gewecke, "kmail: Fixing Tiger Mail Encodings", 10:16pm May 10, 2005 CDT

I think Baltic Rim Windows is technically "Windows-1257"

David -- could you send me a test email? I'd like to look at the details and see what's going on. Click on my name for the address.

PS Guntis -- I ran a test on my machine and with Latvian at the top of the list, the default encoding for Latvian for Mail, plain text, was ISO-8859-4. I think this is very similar to Win 1257, but not sure how much difference it makes.

I really don't know the differences. In MS Outlook 2000 and 2003 I used to use UTF-8. Isn't it the "safest" encoding? I'd like to use that, because if I have to mix Latvian with Russian sometimes, then this is the only choice...

Guntis -- I thought from your first message that you wanted to fix your Mail so it defaulted to something like Baltic Rim (Windows) instead of you having to do it manually for each message. If you want UTF-8 all the time, I don't think you have to do anything at all. Or to make doubly sure, you can open Terminal and type

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

Feel free to send a test message if you'd like me to have a look.

Personally I prefer UTF-8. Whether the systems you need to correspond with can handle it I don't know.

I tried to send Japanese to my son's yahoo.co.jp account and he wrote back that it was garbled.

Then I tried the Terminal suggestion, but it is way too complex for me.

Do I cut and paste

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-2022-JP"

then save it? Could you provide a step by step how-to-put-this-into-terminal explanation for novices like me? What I did, so far, hasn't worked, so I guess I am missing a step or two.

Oh, and I did succeed using the manual method, MESSAGE-TEXT ENCODING-JAPANESE (ISO-2022-JP)

But I certainly don't want to have to do that every time.

Thanks.

Kevin

Do I cut and paste

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-2022-JP"

Try this:

Exit Mail. Select the phrase, inclusive from d to JP". Edit > Copy. Open Terminal. Edit > Paste. Press Return. Close Terminal. Start up Mail.

Thanks for your help, but it doesn't seem to be doing the trick for me.

This is what I got when I emailed from Mail to my yahoo.co.jp account.

곎±éé莸괎©éûŽ½êº¤èЯéò¸éȼ

Oh, well. I'll do it manually, 'til a fix comes along.

Kevin

Kevin -- Strange, it should work, did in my own tests. Are you sending plain text or rich? Send me a test message (without trying to change the encoding) with something simple, like nihongo in kana and kanji, and I'll have a look at what's happening.

Tom,

It's working! After I got home, I tried the plain text setting and it worked like a charm.

Thank you so much for your help and follow up. Now, what would you like from Japan?

Kevin