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Special characters (like é,à,è) in mail are replaced (like é)

special characters (like é,à,è) in mail (Exchange account via DavMail) are replaced (like é).

The same message in OWA is perfect.

The same message in Sparrow is fine. Any ideas ?


Thanks


Jorg

Mail-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Jun 15, 2012 4:39 AM

Reply
15 replies

Jun 15, 2012 5:02 AM in response to jorgfr

This occurs when the app is not unicode savvy or when text is corrupted on the way, in your case prob. in the Exchange server. I am not a specialist in how to set such devices to work, but you may test how things are or are not deformed by sending a test e-mail with contents like

ăĂ â îÎ șȘ țȚ şŞ ţŢ

áéěíóúůý ąǫę ȧė čďťřšťž ćśżźł ǧğ [Central European languages]

ασδφ ΆΈ ἀ ὡ ὠ ῠ ᾶ ῆ ά ᾱ ῑ ι ᾳ ῳ [Greek and Plytonic Greek]

ᴔ ᴙ ᴕ ᴉ ᴃ ᴝ ʚ ɷ ɘ ɼ ɽ ʉ ª [Phonetic transcriptions]

асдф ь ъ а́ е́ Ҧ ҙ ҏԙԏ ꙟмпэрат бг҃ е҃ аⷬ еⷮ [Cyrillic]

CDM: ā̱̣̆́ ḕ̱̯ ṃṇḷṛ ṝ̆ [CDM: combining diacritical marks]


If Unicode encoding is well preserved, you must send and receive the text EXACTLY as it should be.

P.S. After posting, it is correctly displayed in Safari so you may copy-paste it and make the test. Check also text encoding in your mai app. In Mail.app it is under Message/TextEncoding

Jun 15, 2012 5:42 AM in response to Cattus Thraex

That's also my feeling.

So supposedly it's the MAIL app in Lion.

But : whatever message coding I choose, there is no change

Secondly, I have the impression that I would have to choose the (non automatic) coding for each adn every message...


I may add: it does not uccur in all messages, in depends on the origin of the message (i.e. our onw Exchange OK, some external OK)...

Jun 15, 2012 6:13 AM in response to jorgfr

jorgfr wrote:


special characters (like é,à,è) in mail (Exchange account via DavMail) are replaced (like é).



é is what happens when the Mail thinks the text é is encoded as Latin-1 but it is really encoded as UTF-8. Normally messages have a header which tells Mail which encoding to use. Either the header has been stripped or Mail has been unable to read it for some reason. Did you try Message > Text Encoding > UTF-8?


When you do View > Message > Raw Source, do you see things correctly or still botched?

Jun 15, 2012 7:14 AM in response to jorgfr

jorgfr wrote:


when I go to Presentation, Message, ALTERNATIVE TO TEXT it turn right...



Many messages have both a Plain Text and an HTML version included. You should be able to see both in the raw source. If choosing the "alternative" works that indicates only one of the versions is botched.


Mail normally shows the HTML version (if there is one) by default, I believe.

Jun 15, 2012 7:16 AM in response to jorgfr

jorgfr wrote:


If only I could...we're still on Exchange 2003...that's not supported by Apple Mail...

That's too bad. You may need to use Outlook or Entourage then. I'm sure it is DavMail that is scrambling your messages. See if there are any additional configuration changes you can make so that it doesn't scramble them.

Jun 15, 2012 8:11 AM in response to jorgfr

jorgfr wrote:


That's what I thought first as well.

But how can Sparrow do it right, using the same DavMail ?

There is no guarantee Sparrow is doing it right. Mail displays it correctly using the plain text alternative. Perhaps Sparrow isn't even attempting the incorrect rich text.


It is difficult to debug e-mail issues in a web forum. If you want, you can send the file to me an I can tell you exactly what is wrong with it. Save the message as "raw source" and compress the file it generates. Then e-mail that to info at etresoft dot com.

Jun 15, 2012 2:42 PM in response to jorgfr

jorgfr,

I received your e-mail message and replied. Here is my analysis for anyone else interested.


You didn't compress the raw source file so I can't see exactly what you are seeing. However, I did find the HTML content that is causing the problem.


The HTML file has UTF-8 characters but does not have any encoding defined. According to the HTML standard, the default encoding is ISO-8859-1. This file is using UTF-8. I know this because I added the line "<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">" and it then displays correctly in a web browser.


So, Apple Mail is trying to interpret the content as ISO-8859-1 as per the HTML standard and displaying garbage because the content is UTF-8, not ISO-8859-1. I don't know why Sparrow displays it correctly. Sparrow may be defaulting to UTF-8 instead. That is a logical default, but incorrect. It is possible that Sparrow is automatically detecting the UTF-8 content, but that is pretty unlikely. It looks like Apple Mail is displaying the message correctly and Sparrow is the one with the bug.

Special characters (like é,à,è) in mail are replaced (like é)

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