unwanted question marks in mail message text

I'm having this issue as well. 10.4.2 on a Dual 2Ghz G5. Some folks also do not see the attached file (most of the time a PDF), even though it is shown as attached in my sent email, and on top of that will come back to me if they reply or forward the file back to me!

I am having the same problem. Has anyone offered advice as to how to fix it.

I have been having the problem, too, for the last 5 weeks. Specifically, ever since I migrated from Entourage to the Apple "Mail" client.

A PC friend has been investigating the raw HTML that comes from my machine, and has decided that the extraneous "?" symbols (which replace any space-characters beyond a single-space character) derives from an "Apple converted space" command that appears in the HTML version, as in the following example:

[<]SPAN = class=3D"Apple-converted-space"[>]=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0

(note: remove the square-brackets from the above line. I had to insert them to get the complete command to display properly in this posting.) Here, the A0 is hex for the "?" symbol.

Somehow, Apple has to fix this. Like everyone else here, we're in a horrible fix when we send email to PC users -- we run the rist of looking quite unprofessional.

Hopefully, this is being addressed with the 10.4.3 update expected soon but regardless, IMO it is more professional looking and less prone to problems overall to send messages formatted with Plain Text vs. messages formatted with RTF or HTML.

Check Why HTML in E-Mail is a Bad Idea.

Agree that HTML-email isn't always a great idea, but RFT is (supposed to be) another matter entirely. Being able to use italics and/or bold font is frequently quite useful.

Apple's "Mail" client made SOME kind of move away from HTML-mail, I gather. Specifically, the message-format choices (in Preferences) are now "plain text" or "RTF" (they've dropped the ref to HTML). But, regardless of what they CALL it, it's generating HTML code.

I'm hoping for a fix that'll let me continue with RFT.

Vince

Hello Vince.

Tiger Mail's RTF is RTF/HTML but you cannot compose complex HTML directly within the body of a message. This change allows for forwarding a received message that was composed in or includes HTML and for mailing contents of a web page from within Safari which is not available with previous Mail.app versions.

In addition, the RTF included with previous Mail.app versions cannot be read properly by all email clients when received and in that situation, all text is converted to Plain Text.

10.4.3 does NOT fix the automatic insertion of the question mark symbol (i.e., the ?) by MAIL. Again, as I identified in an earlier post (in September) here, the MAIL client is inserting a question mark whenever the text includes a double-spaced (i.e., a space followed by a space). The only solution remains to use Plain text when composing messages; RTF/HTML remains unavailable to Mac users who must professionally communicate with PC users (i.e., all of us who are in business).

I really cannot believe that Apple is continuing to let this one remain unaddressed.

It's a quality issue and a visibly embarassing one. Enough said.

Vincent -- Mail is not inserting question marks. A0 is hex for no-break space. Question Mark is 3F. The receiving program is interpreting A0 as an unknown character and displaying ? to indicate this. As for why, I'm not totally sure yet.

Hi Tom,

The HTML coming out of Mail.app seems to a bit strange. Another guy who looked at the source came up with the exact string that Mail is putting in. Regardless of whether it's poorly or correctly formated HTML, the fact of the matter is that it doesn't render in Outlook properly and it should be addressed in another fashion so that Outlooks gets it right. Other mail systems do this. Only Mail.app seems to be the issue.

Thanks...Neil (I'm impressed with the 7000+ postings!)

PS I suspect this might be related to a Win Outlook bug that causes garbled text when accented characters are used with rich text. See this note:

Tom Gewecke, "kmail: Fixing Garbled Text in Win Outlook from Tiger Mail", 05:15pm May 27, 2005 CDT

I don't know whether the remedy suggested there, changing the encoding to UTF-8, will work in this case. It would probably also be worth trying changing it to Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1.

Only Mail.app seems to be the issue.

I think it may also be that only Win Outlook cannot read this html correctly. But you are right, as a practical matter, even if it is a bug in Outlook, Mail should adapt the way it operates. In the meantime there may be a work-around via Mail's encodings.

In one concrete case where an html newsletter was causing question marks in Windows Outlook, I found that adding a dingbat from the Unicode Dingbats Block to the message text seemed to banish them. This essentially forces the whole message into UTF-8 so that Outlook doesn't read the html with the wrong encoding.

In theory choosing UTF-8 from Message > Text Encoding should do the same thing, but in this case it did not work for some reason.

It would be very useful to know if this solves the problem for anyone else.

Seems like an EXTREMELY clunky "fix", if you ask me. You'd have to separately, FOR EACH OUTBOUND MESSAGE (?!?!), select UTF-8 message encoding, AND drop a dingbat into the text. Crazy. Is there even a way for force automatic UTF-8 encoding as the default for outbound messages?

Vince

Just the dingbat should be sufficient.

The way to force UTF-8 by default is given in the link provide in the earlier message. To repeat:

Tom Gewecke, "kmail: Fixing Garbled Text in Win Outlook from Tiger Mail", 05:15pm May 27, 2005 CDT

It would be useful to know if that works for you, of if the added dingbat is required.