Encoding issues with mail

Would the following solution work?
In terminal, if i were to type +defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-8859-1"+
Would this achieve the desired result?

Maybe. Problems like this are normally caused by bugs in Win Outlook, which applies the wrong encoding to Mail messages that can have both plain text and html copies using different encodings. Another fix might be to use UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1. Leopard Mail should not have this problem I think.

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/woutlook.html

As soon as an image is inserted the charset becomes UTF-8 and the recipient sees the =AO character surrounding all words that spell checker has flagged as wrong. The Windows based PCs are displaying the emails in UTF-8, and it is this that is causing the issue (it also removes all font-face attributes too).

Go to your Sent folder in Mail and do View > Message > Raw Source on one of the messages you described above. Are there not two versions, html in UTF-8 and plain text in ISO-8859-1? If so, your problem is same as described in the note I gave you (i.e. mixed encodings).

If I were to try the Terminal command and find it doesn't work as intended, what would I need to type to revert to Automatic Charset as is currently the case?

Sorry, I can't remember if there is a way to "revert", but ISO-8859-1 should not cause any problems.

I am just so puzzled as to why only after using the spell checker it displays incorrectly on other machines.

That is strange. Could you perhaps send me one of these messages? I would be very interested to look at the code. The right way to do that is to go to your Sent folder, select the message, and do Message > Send Again, but put my address in place of the original one (tom at bluesky dot org).

P.S have you experience with Entourage? I have it with office 2004 for Mac

Sorry, no. I think only (Tiger) Mail should cause this kind of problem with Outlook, however.

Hi Tom,

I'm the poor Windows user who's been trying to sort this issue out - and to say my head is starting to ache would be an understatement. You'd think that, all other differences aside, Microsoft and Apple could have at least worked together to standardise email communication. But, enough with the pipe dreams.

If I could impose on you just a bit further to help me try and understand a thing or two I'd appreciate it. Can I just clarify something first - when you keep referring to Outlook is this just a shorthand way of referring to Outlook Express? The only reason I ask is that so far Outlook 2007 and at least one earlier version (unknown which at the moment) have not been suffering this problem, only OE and Windows Mail (Vista). Outlook displays multi-encoded emails fine while OE says Unicode (UTF-8) in the the title bar but won't display the mail correctly unless encoding is changed to ISO. There must be something in the spell check feature that uses the A0 character to pick out badly spelled words, but then for some reason they aren't removed after the spell check.

It does seem that you're correct (and thanks for that) in that it's a the two encoding types being sent in the email that seem to be causing this. We tried using Terminal to enforce Windows-1252 and the when that didn't work ISO-8859-1. This didn't help either. All it seems to have done is remove any options in the Encoding Menu other than Automatic. There doesn't seem to be a way of forcing both encodings to be the same. When sending an email with just text - however formatted - the encoding is never automatically set at UTF-8, it's only the addition of an embedded image that switches to this and, combined with a spell check, causes the problem. As said, it's easy enough to fix at the other end by having OE/Mail encode all incoming messages as Windows(ISO) but you can't always rely on other users to help you fix display problems when they see it as your fault not theirs anyway....

You mention that other clients may help (Entourage and Thunderbird) - well we tried Thunderbird and that was also problematic. All was going well until incoming messages to the version on the Mac had stationery (using embedded CSS) applied. Then whole blocks of text were missing and when scrolling the letters of the words would squash up - imagine magenetic letters on a fridge then sliding a bar up under them pushing them all upwards into a jumble and that was what was happening.

Maybe Mike'll upgrade eventually to Leopard, but for the time being we're muddling through with the Vista/XP/Tiger jamboree.......

Thanks again for your help and advice on all this.

Ian

Message was edited by: HappyTrucker

Can I just clarify something first - when you keep referring to Outlook is this just a shorthand way of referring to Outlook Express? The only reason I ask is that so far Outlook 2007 and at least one earlier version (unknown which at the moment) have not been suffering this problem, only OE and Windows Mail (Vista).

When this issue and its fixes were first discussed in mid-2005, the main problem seemed to be email containing accented characters being sent to Outlook users. I don't know if anyone ever looked in detail at OE or other clients. And interest has been limited since Leopard came out in late 2007.

It does seem that you're correct (and thanks for that) in that it's a the two encoding types being sent in the email that seem to be causing this. We tried using Terminal to enforce Windows-1252 and the when that didn't work ISO-8859-1. .... There doesn't seem to be a way of forcing both encodings to be the same.

Normally the way to force both encodings to be the same at the Mac end is to use the Terminal to set things to UTF-8, and if that does not work then add a Unicode dingbat to the text. Have these two fixes been tried? To tell what is really happening at the Mac end you need to look directly at the source code of the message and check the charset= statements that preceed the plain text and html versions of the content.