Entourage 2004 - Missing Characters

P

Paul Robinson

I often have the need to send large (100K or greater) plain-text files.
After upgrading to Entourage 2004 I find that these files arrive at
Their destination with random characters missing throughout. If the
File size is small enough the problem goes away. I have gone to Apple
Mail because it handles these files fine. However, I prefer the extra
Bells and whistles of Entourage. I am using a G4 Powerbook, 1.67MHZ and
Panther 10.3.9. I have also tried this on an iMac G4 "lamp" with the
Same result.

Any ideas?

Paul
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

I often have the need to send large (100K or greater) plain-text files.
After upgrading to Entourage 2004 I find that these files arrive at
Their destination with random characters missing throughout. If the
File size is small enough the problem goes away. I have gone to Apple
Mail because it handles these files fine. However, I prefer the extra
Bells and whistles of Entourage. I am using a G4 Powerbook, 1.67MHZ and
Panther 10.3.9. I have also tried this on an iMac G4 "lamp" with the
Same result.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

I never heard of this happening, but you could surely avoid this by sending
the files stuffed or zipped. Although Entourage offers the convenience of
Compression (Stuffit) directly from the message window (click Attachment
area open, click long button within, choose Compression: Macintosh), that
might not be too convenient if you're sending to Windows recipients who
usually don't bother to get Stuffit Expander (also Mac recipients in Tiger
might not have it). Instead, zip the files before sending. In Tiger, that
works perfectly (control-click the file and choose Archive). I'm not 100%
sure that 10.3.9's format unzips perfectly on Windows computers. Try it out.
If not, get Stuffit Standard (or Deluxe) with DropZip, or choose this moment
to upgrade to Tiger.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
P

Paul Robinson

As Co-editor of a scientific journal I send manuscripts to practically
All countries in the free (and not so free) world. This is done in text-
Only format (called crystallographic information files) so that they are
Usable in even the most technologically deficient countries. I realize
That I could send these files as attachments, zipped or otherwise, but
That assumes the person on the other end can handle them in that form,
A bad assumption to make. Thus it is necessary for the e-mail program
To allow me to paste my text-only documents directly into the body of the
E-mail message. Apparently there is a bug in Entourage which prevents
This from working properly. If you would like to confirm the bug, and
I would be most appreciative, create a 100K plain-text message and send
It to yourself. If it comes back with lots of missing characters then
My problem is not an isolated one and should be brought to the attention
Of Microsoft. In the meantime I will get acquainted with the Apple
Mail client which works flawlessly with my large files.

Paul Robinson
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

You seem to have other problems as well. How - and why - are you
capitalizing the first character of every new line?

Actually I've dealt with lots of large files - way over 100K. Some of my
scripts use text files in the multi-megabyte size, including MBOX files.
Customers have sometimes had to send these to me. No missing characters.

(Your first message was a bit misleading then? You're not sending plain-text
_files_ - you're sending large plain text _messages_? Pasting in text isn't
the same as sending a file.)

I just sent myself a message with 260K of text in it. As far as I can see,
it transferred perfectly. No missing characters. To make it a harder test, I
chose am MBOX file, opened it in TextEdit, saved a copy as .txt, copied the
contents into an Entourage plain text message, sent it to myself, opened the
received message, selected and copied all into TextEdit, saved as plain text
there (everything looks fine), changed the extension to .mbox, and dragged
it into Entourage where it makes a perfect flawless message folder where all
the messages I can see are perfect reproductions of the original.

Now - do your scientific documents include mathematical symbols and
such-like? Any other languages, or characters from non-Western European
languages? If so, this isn't really plain text. Depending on which
characters are included, the encoding of the mail message would be
automatically set to IS0-8859-1 or maybe even Unicode UTF-8. If the
recipient's email client can't read those well, things would be altered.
(But your own Entourage as recipient should read them OK.) You're not
somehow setting the encoding to specific Character Format, are you? If
you're setting it to, say, Western European when it isn't, trouble would
ensue.



--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
B

Barry Wainwright

If you would like to confirm the bug, and
I would be most appreciative, create a 100K plain-text message and send
It to yourself. If it comes back with lots of missing characters then
My problem is not an isolated one and should be brought to the attention
Of Microsoft.
Click to expand...

I tried this and got no missing characters.

Check the source of the returned message to see if the characters are
missing in there as well as in the displayed version of the message
('source' under the 'view' menu)

There will potentially be several issues with pasting data such as this into
plain text messages. First, any line beginning with 'From' will have '> "
prepended to it. This is deliberate, and common to most mail systems, as a
line beginning with 'From' is indicative of the start of a new transmission
'envelope'. Second, any line containing just a period may, under certain
circumstances, result in the message being truncated at that point. This is
due to the fact that such a line is used within the mail transmission
protocols to indicate 'end of message'. Entourage will usually capture this,
but it does it by adding extra characters for transmission and dropping them
on receipt. It may be that there are cases when the data is pasted in that
this mechanism may not work too well. Thirdly, in plain text mode Entourage
will hard-wrap the data at around 76 characters per line. If your data lines
are less that this length then there should be no problem, but more than
this and your lines will be broken up - this could be a big issue.

Far better would be to attach the files, rather than paste them into the
message body - this will definitely preserve all the necessary information.
 
R

Roger Cornelis

This sounds a lot like the problem that I had (see my earlier posting of
today).
If your PowerBook has a firewall, try disabling it, and see what happens.

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