> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 12:49:09 +0100
> From: Jean-Denis Muys-Vasovic <jdmv_at_mail.com>
> Subject: [NTLK] Accents on characters in emails
>
>
> Daniel,
>
> I use Eudora under Mac OS X and this one shows as weird characters to
> me, but are they the correct ones? Quite often here in France I
> receive emails with accented character messed up. I believe (but I am
> not sure) that they use some PC-specific high-ascii character
> encoding, which is not the same as on my Mac. I suspect that the
> fault belongs to the sender email programs which doesn't use the
> correct ISO-something or unicode encoding.
>
.../...
> I would really like to reach some understanding on when those
> character are correctly or incorrectly sent/received, so that I can
> give informed feedback when I receive incorrect ones.
>
There's a few things involved here.
The quoted-printable encoding, that translates specific characters into
=XX strings (check the rfc 2822 for more details). As explained by
someone else this doesn't always get translated/recognized properly by
the list manager.
The code page that is used to display the characters (what "graphical
symbol" to display for what byte value).
In addition to this, the MIME email message usually has a header line
that states the character page to use to display the message properly
(for example iso latin, Windows latin, Mac latin, japanese, etc). If the
header doesn't correspond to the real character map used in the message,
the accents would be correct (see point 1).
Now, to make it short, if you use a nice mailer, you should be able to
change the character map used to display the message and have all the
accents look as they should if it's not done automatically (Format/Text
Encodings in OS X Mail).
Hope this helps,
Laurent
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