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Pegasus Mail & Mercury » Pegasus Mail » Pegasus Mail Community Support » Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

Last post 08-20-2008, 20:38 by StanH. 7 replies.
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  •  08-19-2008, 3:54

    • StanH is not online. Last active: 08-28-2008, 23:52 StanH
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    Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    I send email with Pegasus through a Comcast SMTP. I receive emails on the POP3 of the Internet provider of my website. I download them with Pegasus  or view the email subject lines on the provider's server with Firefox browser.

    I sent an email to myself with a "-" (minus sign) in the title. When I read the email subject lines on my provider's server using Firefox. The "-" appears as "–". I downloaded the email with Pegasus to the newmail folder and character is back to being displayed as "-".

    This may seem like a trivial issue, but in other areas I have more serious problems with unwanted character representations.

     My OS is Windows XP Pro. What is the explanation for this?
     

    Sincerely, Stan Hilliard
     

  •  08-19-2008, 18:21

    • StanH is not online. Last active: 08-28-2008, 23:52 StanH
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    Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    More Information:

    I have determined that this is an intermittent problem. It occurred Sunday and Monday but I could not repeat it today (Tuesday). However, Sunday's example is still on my provider's server and still displays the –. When I view the subject line on the server with Firefox I still see the – but when I view it in the Pegasus "Selective Mail Download" window the character shows as a vertical bar.

    I think this issue widespread. I did a Google search on – and got 141,000,000 hits.

    Even though I cannot repeat the problem now, I would still like to know some hypotheses about the cause. It has happened before (unrelated to Pegasus) and has gotten into the text of messages on a phpBB forum that I administer. I expect it will happen again.
    Stan Hilliard
     

  •  08-19-2008, 20:51

    • irelam is not online. Last active: 01-07-2009, 4:50 irelam
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    Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    This is the sender's problem. They have specified the charset ISO-8859-1 when they should have coded the charset CP1252. This is very commonly seen in email messages sent from MS Outlook where the extended characters are used (commonly the bullet character or hyphen).

    Martin

  •  08-19-2008, 23:08

    • StanH is not online. Last active: 08-28-2008, 23:52 StanH
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    Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    irelam:
    This is the sender's problem. ...

    I am the sender, and used Pegasus. I noticed the problem in a copy that I emailed to myself. Below is the header code from my "copy to self" folder. It shows the specified charset as ISO-8859-1.
    (I modified the email addresses.)

    X-cs: R
    X-CS-Version: 1.0
    From: Stan Hilliard <x@samplingplans.com>
    X-RS-ID: ToPerson
    X-RS-Flags: 1,1,1,1,0,0,0
    X-RS-Header: In-reply-to: <001301c8ed30$8f3be760$f900a8c0@OWNERPF68LBC21>
    X-RS-Header: References: <001301c8ed30$8f3be760$f900a8c0@OWNERPF68LBC21>
    X-RS-Sigset: 1
    To: "Becky x" <x@comcast.net>
    Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?For_Peoples_Church_Newsletter_=E2=80=93_September_2008?=
    Cc: "x" <x@ix.netcom.com>, "x" <x@comcast.net >,
     "x" <x@pressenter.com>, "x" <x@peoplescongregational.org>,
     me@samplingplans.com
    Comments: Confirmation of reading was requested.
    Comments: Confirmation of delivery was requested.
    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
    Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
    Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:47:49 -0500

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
              "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
    <html  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"><head>
    <title></title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"/>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"/>
    </head>
    <body>
    <div align="left">
    <font face="Arial" size="2">
    <span style=" font-size:10pt">
    Hi Becky,</span></font>
     

    I don't think I ever messed with the charset. I don't know how. Could it be that Comcast's SMTP or my provider's POP3 changes the header?

    Notice, as I said previously, that this effect is not always repeatable. I sent test-messages to myself today and the conversion did not occur.

    Stan Hilliard 

  •  08-20-2008, 0:17

    • irelam is not online. Last active: 01-07-2009, 4:50 irelam
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    Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    Please check the value of the Mime charset in menu Tools/Options/Advanced settings  It should be Utf-8 or Windows-1252 See web Url:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 for 1252 definition. Note that 8-Bit coding is invalid with ISO-8859-1 charset.  The character you are seeing is likely xA6 or xC6   The ISO-8859-1 definition is shown at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso-8859-1

     HTH

     Martin

  •  08-20-2008, 7:50

    • StanH is not online. Last active: 08-28-2008, 23:52 StanH
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    Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    irelam:
    Please check the value of the Mime charset in menu Tools/Options/Advanced settings  It should be Utf-8 or Windows-1252

    The setting is ISO-8859-1. This confuses me because the header code that I pasted above refers to both ISO-8859-1 and utf-8:

    Content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
    Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT

    and

    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"/>

    Q1: Why do I see both charsets referred to in the heading? 

    Q2: How  should I decide whether to select Windows-1252 or UTF-8 in Tools/Options/Advanced settings?

    Q3: Am I right that UTF-8 files are twice as large but can represent more different kinds of characters?

    A - The three day old email on serve lists the subject with the – . But on the server if I open that email in a Firefox tab the - (dash) in the subject-line of the email displays as a dash.
    B - I forwarded that same email from my "copy to myself" folder to myself. This time the – shows up in both the server's email list and the opened email.
    C - I sent a test email to myself with the title "test - test". The dash displayed as a dash on the server.

    Q4: Comparing A,B, & C, what might explains that apparent instability?

    Stan Hilliard

  •  08-20-2008, 17:01

    Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    Q1: Why do I see both charsets referred to in the heading?
    You are using both in the message.  You are using high bit characters that are being converted. You probably did a bit of cut and paste for this.  

    Q2: How  should I decide whether to select Windows-1252 or UTF-8 in Tools/Options/Advanced settings?

    Not necessary, use UTF-8 all the time and it will be able to handle your mixing of plain text and high bit characters.

    Q3: Am I right that UTF-8 files are twice as large but can represent more different kinds of characters?

    They are not twice as large but the UTF-8 can handle all sorts of characters.   The only problem would be is if you ran into older mail clients that could not handle UTF-8.  If you want to continue using ISO-8859-1 use the "Paste special" to ensure that you are always pasting characters that are valid in this character set by pasting "Text only, without styles and pictures"

     

    Thomas R. Stephenson
    San Jose, California
    Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

  •  08-20-2008, 20:38

    • StanH is not online. Last active: 08-28-2008, 23:52 StanH
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    Re: Please explain why some emails display unwanted characters?

    Thomas R. Stephenson:
    ... use UTF-8 all the time and it will be able to handle your mixing of plain text and high bit characters.

    I changed Pegasus advanced settings to UTF-8 charset and forwarded the offending document to myself. The subject line still contained –. Then I noticed that the dash in the original email (in Pegasus) was longer than usual so I replaced it with a normal -. Now the dash displays correctly. As you say, I must have pasted the original from Word.

     Thanks, Stan Hilliard
     
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