Weird characters in mail I send to Outlook users

For some time now I have had to compose all original and reply emails using plain text as upwards of 90% of my clients use Outlook. As soon as I don't weird characters like A's with hats or Question marks start dotting themselves through out my email. The question marks are particularly deadly as they can make what I am trying to say turn into a question at Exactly the Wrong Moment. Not good in business. Not good for impressing business clients.

I've tried all the fixes suggested http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121814&tstart=75 but nothing sticks. The only thing that works is using plain text.

That's ok most of the time but sometimes I need to use rich or html to make something stand out. (Besides it is not exactly making my business look up to the minute by using plain text in my emails. )

Does anyone else have any OTHER fixes that work.

PowerBookG4, Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on Jun 2, 2006 1:42 AM

Reply
8 replies

Jun 2, 2006 3:26 AM in response to CBRGAL

I've tried all the fixes suggested
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID
=121814&tstart=75
but nothing sticks. The only
thing that works is using plain text.


Have you really tried the fix where you put a dingbat in the text of each message? I think that should always work. Send me an example of the kind of message that is causing you problems if you like (tom at bluesky dot org).

Jun 25, 2006 8:56 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Hi Tom
SprUNG!

SOrry for delay in replying - have been MIA.

No haven't tried putting dingbat in each email - (a) don't know how, (b) seemed kinda pointless - I am trying to avoid having miscellaneous weird chars in my email. Adding one deliberately seemed counterintuitive.

However - if you tell me how - I'll surely give it whirl.

Jun 27, 2006 12:57 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks Tom,
Am trying it out now on a couple of friends who always bring the weirdo chars to my attention. I've added the dingbat to my signature to see if that could automate the process for me. I send so many emails that it is not time efficient for me to manually insert a dingbat in every email I send.

I checked the raw source encoding thingy as suggested in the link you posted and all charsets in my sent item were UTF-8 so here's hoping.

I'd already tried changing the default to UTF-8 in the console and that doesn't seem to work - I still get complaints.

thanks for your help - I'll let you know how it goes.

Jun 27, 2006 3:19 AM in response to CBRGAL

Am trying it out now on a couple of friends who
always bring the weirdo chars to my attention. I've
added the dingbat to my signature to see if that
could automate the process for me.


Let me know -- not sure putting something in the sig normally works.


I'd already tried changing the default to UTF-8 in
the console and that doesn't seem to work - I still
get complaints.


If you need at some point to try other things, you could change the default to ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252.

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Weird characters in mail I send to Outlook users

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