email formatting

K

Kate_Lev

I use Entourage to access my BT mail account.

When I compose emails, the people receiving them tell me that the formatting makes the email illegible. They get some text at the top of the email saying it has been sent in MIME format and the body of the email is then sprinkled with code of some sort (i.e. the pound sign comes out as =A3).

Does anyone know how I can fix this?!
 
W

William Smith

I use Entourage to access my BT mail account.

When I compose emails, the people receiving them tell me that the
formatting makes the email illegible. They get some text at the top of
the email saying it has been sent in MIME format and the body of the
email is then sprinkled with code of some sort (i.e. the pound sign
comes out as =A3).

Does anyone know how I can fix this?!
Click to expand...

Are you composing your messages in a non-English language that has
characters with accent marks or something beyond regular alpha-numeric
characters? What is your current character set (Format --> Character
Set)? Is it Automatic or something different?

Also, what version of Entourage are you using?

I'm not an expert in language encoding but here's what I know.

The "code" that you're describing sounds like UTF-8 encoding for ASCII
characters beyond the standard 256 ASCII character set. Letters with
diacritical marks or foreign languages that make extensive use of
accents will use characters beyond the standard ASCII set.

To facilitate passing these characters through E-mail systems that may
not handle them properly, they need to be converted to UTF-8 encoding,
which substitutes them with codes made up of characters in the lower 256
character set. Therefore, =A3 is equivalent to the pound sign ( # ).

Try encoding your message as UTF-8 before sending and see if that makes
a difference. Entourage 2008 should do this automatically but I'm not
sure about Entourage 2004. The problem could very well be on the side of
your recipient and his E-mail server too.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
 
B

Barry Wainwright

I use Entourage to access my BT mail account.
Click to expand...

Me too.
When I compose emails, the people receiving them tell me that the formatting
makes the email illegible. They get some text at the top of the email saying
it has been sent in MIME format and the body of the email is then sprinkled
with code of some sort (i.e. the pound sign comes out as =A3).

Does anyone know how I can fix this?!
Click to expand...

Does this happen to all recipients, or just one or two? If they are seeing
the "MIME Format" message, then their mail clients are not properly decoding
the message format you are sending. This may be because of errors in your
mail, or it may indicate a problem at their end.

Have you added any custom headers in the account settings dialogs? Clear
that out first and see if it improves.



--
Barry Wainwright
Microsoft MVP (see <http://www.microsoft.com/mvp/> for details)
Visit the Entourage User¹s Weblog for Hints, tips and troubleshooting
information:
http://www.barryw.net/weblog/
 
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