Characters shifted in emails, "a" becomes "e" etc.

[rcarlton]

I'm running Entourage 2004 v11.2.5. Recently certain emails I receive
have started looking like gibberish, or like they are written in code.
But I have found that in fact, it is just that all the characters have
been shifted along in the alphabet. So instead of "a", I see "e",
instead of "b", "f" etc. So a word like "Hello" becomes "Lipps", and so
on thru the entire message. It is the weirdest thing.

If I hit Reply, the text from the gibberish email is shown correctly in
the reply email. This is the workaround I use to read these emails.

Not all emails do this, just a few, but it has started becoming more
frequent and it's very inconvenient. I have not been able to find
anything that they have in common, except they are all from Windows
users, but i get many other emails that do not have this problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Mickey Stevens]

Does this happen with HTML messages or plain text messages or both?

If you go to View > Source, does the message display properly? Is there a
common User-Agent or X-Mailer that is sending the problematic messages?

What happens if you go to Format > Character Set and try changing to the two
"Western European" character sets or the two "Unicode" character sets? If
that corrects the problem, it could be a problem with the program that sent
the message.

Have you tried rebuilding the database? In Entourage 2004, you must launch
the Microsoft Database Utility.
1. Launch Entourage, holding down the ³Option² key. Or, launch the
Database Utility separately; it is located in HD/Applications/Microsoft
Office 2004/Office/.
2. If you are prompted, allow the Database Utility to quit open Office
applications.
3. Once the Database Utility is open, select your identity from the list at
the top.
4. Click the ³Rebuild Database² button, and click ³Continue.²