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Date: | Fri, 8 Sep 2006 17:27:49 -0400 |
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Hello,
I got a message from a user asking me how to let Hotmail users know to make
their messages plaintext.
I told him I believed it was in options---but, there's a caveat I forgot.
If the user is running the Mac OS there's potential that the message may not
appear to be plaintext no matter what.
There's an interesting resource item about plaintext pasted below from the
New York Times.
Add in some of the quirks of any screen reading program and you understand
why plaintext is best, but other languages might be necessary.
posting from Emma's Family Farm
Windsor Maine;
Steve Hoad
vQ & A
Odd Characters in E-Mail
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By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Published: August 31, 2006
Q. Why is it that in some e-mail messages, certain letters or punctuation
marks are often replaced by question marks in the message body?
A. Question marks usually appear in a message’s text if your e-mail program
does not know how to display the typographical character used by the sender.
Certain types of quotation marks, apostrophes and foreign accents are among
the characters that may be rendered incorrectly.
In the United States, message text composed in plain Ascii (pronounced
AS-kee, for American Standard Code for Information Interchange) translates
the most
widely between the various computer systems and mail programs. Ascii is
limited to 128 characters, and many are nonprinting control characters like
tabs.
All of the upper- and lower-case letters in the English alphabet are
represented in basic Ascii, as are standard punctuation marks like periods
and exclamation
marks. Double and single quotation marks, however, are represented by the
symbols used to denote feet and inches, which are often referred to as
“straight”
quotes. Typographer’s quotation marks (also called “curly” quotes) and other
characters are not part of the standard Ascii set and are rendered
incorrectly
on the screen in mail systems that handle only Ascii.
Text that has been cut and pasted from word-processing programs into e-mail
messages can sometimes contain characters outside of the basic Ascii set,
and
those characters are the ones that typically show up as question marks when
the mail program doesn’t know how to display them. (Saving a document as
plain
text before cutting and pasting can help resolve this problem.)
But not everyone speaks English and more characters were needed than the
basic Ascii set can hold. So other sets of characters and text-encoding
standards
were developed, but these can vary by language or even choice of computer
platform, like Windows or the Macintosh operating systems. If you have a
message
that looks odd on the screen or includes a lot of foreign characters,
changing the text- or character-encoding settings within your mail program
may help
display it properly.
A detailed explanation of character sets and text encoding for e-mail
messages is at Dan’s Mail Format Site at
mailformat.dan.info/body/charsets.html.
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