Non printable characters in email replies

C

Condor

Hello,

I'm not really sure if I should be posting this here. Here's the issue.

I have a CRM application which processes incoming email and uses Exch.
Server 2003 to dispatch and extract messages. There is a concept of
"bunching" all emails (including new, replies and forwards) with the same
subject line into one 'object' (in my app's CRM parlance).. Users/agents work
on these 'objects'. There is support for Japanese language too. In the past
few days, some Japanese users are facing a strange problem.

They get email from a client in Japanese and reply back to the client (orig.
message is included). Now, when the client responds back, non printable
characters are being included in the 'reply'.Once these characters are
received into the system, they get included in all to and fro replies 'hence
forth'. Here's some Japanese text with these characters...

莉・è³ç¿«ï½’繧ゅ■縺セ縺励※縲∵悽縺é›æ’«ç¸ºãƒ»ç²‹ç¹§ä¸Šâ—‹ç¸ºã‚©èŸ‡ã‚»ç¸ºå¶ï½‹ç¸ºç¢‘ソ比ソ。縺ィ縺輔○縺ヲ縺・◆縺 縺阪∪縺å¶Â€ãƒ»>縺薙・蠎ヲ縺ッ蠖é‹ã‚§ç˜å“¨ç¸ºã‚¡ç¸ºãƒƒç¸ºé›é´¨ç¸ºã‚©ç¸ºã‚§ç¹§å¾Œâ˜…縲∬ェ 縺ォ逕ウ縺苓ィウ縺æ–*縺・∪縺帙s縺ァ縺励◆縲

The diamonds, dots, squares and mathematical (integration) symbols are what
I'm referring to. These characters can be observed when you enable "non
printable charracters" icon in MS word, for example. This is not observed
with specific customers but with all customers who respond from hotmail,
yahoo, gmail etc.. Not really sure if they use Outlook to respond, though...

This has become annoying since the customers think that the agents are doing
something which is garbling up the text. I need to find out where this is
happening... From my application, looking at the 'thread' of responses in the
email 'object'; it seems to be clear that these non printable chars are being
introduced by the customer's response (first)..

Can you help me this this, or direct me to the appropriate newsgroup? Thanks.
 
P

Pat Willener

Two possibilities:
a) the encoding of the reply message is not correct;
b) the application that processes incoming messages may not correctly
handle multibyte data streams. String functions must be able to handle
multibyte characters (some old string functions can only handle ASCII
characters).
 

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