Outlook Express occasionally garbles my emails

[dummy]

Hi.

I recently discovered that the emails I send to people with OE are garbled. This, though, does not occur whenever I send an email. Instead it happens at "random" times (random is perhaps not the right word, but I haven't found out any particular pattern for my problem to occur).

I have Win98 SE running on a Pentium 133MHz. First I was using OE5, but I thought I could switch to OE6 with the hope that my problem would go away. Now I use OE6 but the problem is still there.

There are two things that I noticed. First, I went to Help (in OE5) and saw the files used by OE5. The comctl32.dll file was listed as of "unknown" version. I found this a bit suspicious and decided to investigate it a bit further. I saw that that file (version 5.81) was listed in the Version Conflict Manager's list and went, thus, forward in putting back the backed up version 5.80.

When I rebooted I found my quick launch toolbar having a pitch black background which made me think that comctl32.dll v5.81 is quite vital to the welfare of my system (yeah, right... anyway). As I had no other version of that dll file I put back the v5.81 and everything seemed to get back to normal. Which, sadly also meant that OE6 would continue not to function properly.

Each unreadable email, if I view its source from properties (after right clicking on the message), has more than one parts (OE creates a multi part message. No idea why...) each part having, for example, the following as a header:

------=_NextPart_000_0025_01C1C9AC.93C677E0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

------

The emails which were not readable had one part full with a code of the kind: D=00I=00V=00>=00<=00F=00O=00N=00T=00 =
=00f=00a=00c=00e=00=3D=00A=00r=00i=00a=00l=00

Why is this happening and how do I stop it from occuring?

Could anyone help?

Thanks,

Jon

[TonyT]

Open OE\
Tools Menu\
Options\
Send Tab\
Plain Text Settiings\
Message Format = MIME\
Encode Text Using = NONE

[dummy]

Hi TonyT and thanks for replying and (should I say ? , hopefully :D ) solving my problem.

I did what you said and I changed my Plain Text settings to MIME with no encoding.

So, let me understand a bit how OE works. Let me know if I am mistaken.

Suppose that OE transforms the text I write to HTML format. It will do that no matter if I write in HTML, in the first place. Thus, when I see the properties of the email, I see the multi parts: 1. the thing I wrote in the format I chose 2. the OE encoded part.

If that is correct then in case the problem is my plain text settings (which were Uuencode and not quoted-printable as one might have guessed from the info

------=_NextPart_000_0025_01C1C9AC.93C677E0
Content-Type: text/plain; <---
charset="iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <---

but say that Uuencode is the default encoding (quoted-printable (?))... :rolleyes: )

then should I conclude that OE was messing the encoding to HTML, of the plain text I was writing in Uuencode (or quoted-printable)?

If that is the case then should there be such a problem in the first place? I mean, could there be any corrupt files to blame for that?

Thanks.

All the best,
Jon

[TonyT]

Hmmm......there's only 2 formats of composing and sending email in OE, plain text and html.

When composing a plain text email it looks just like text in the window. No colors, no special formatting, no images eytc etc. It gets sent as plain text.

To compose html email you must use teh Format Menu in OE.

Your issues are probably stemming from your OE settings. If a user sends you an email that has been encoded with one format and you reply using a different encoding format he will get a jumbled message.

Use the setting in OE Send Tab area to "send replys in same format they were received". (something like that)
***********************************************888


To read and send international messages
Outlook Express can usually display messages in the language in which they were sent. However, some messages, particularly those from newsgroups, often do not have enough information (or the information is incorrect) in the header file to display the correct language.

To change the language encoding for a message you are reading

In the message window, click the View menu, point to Encoding, and then click the language encoding you want to use. (You must already have support for that language, which you can get from the "International" area of the Internet Explorer Web site.)

Outlook Express displays incoming messages using the default encoding for reading messages unless the message header specifies a particular language encoding.

To set the default encoding for reading messages

On the Tools menu, click Options, and on the Read tab, click Fonts.

Select a language at the top, and then click the Set as Default button.
Sending international messages
When you reply to a message, it is sent in the same language encoding as the original. If you change the language encoding in your reply, the original characters may not appear properly unless you are sending the message in HTML (and the receiving program can read HTML). You can also send the message using Unicode; however, not all mail and newsreading programs can display a Unicode message.

To use a different encoding for sending a single message

In the message window, on the Format menu, point to Encoding and then click the language encoding you want to use.
New messages use the default encoding setting for sending messages.

To set the default encoding for sending messages

On the Tools menu, click Options, and on the Send tab, click International Settings and select the default encoding you want.