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Character encodings in email attachments
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esuhl
Posts: 9,409 Forumite
in Techie Stuff
I recently emailed a few .reg files to a friend, but on his PC the filenames appear to have become corrupted. When he downloads the files from the email server they appear like this in Windows Explorer:
I assume that there's some kind of problem with the character encoding, but I'm not sure how to fix it. The registry file was originally emailed to me by my friend; I've just edited two copies of the original and emailed them back. The text editor I used (Metapad) is set to save the files as "DOS text", but I'm not sure if that matters as it's the filenames that are corrupt (I'm not sure about the contents).
My friend has Vista and uses Yahoo's webmail, while I'm using Windows 7, and I sent the email via Thunderbird which has the default character encoding set to Western (ISO-8859-1) for incoming and outgoing mail.
Can anyone help me understand what's going on here? :huh:
I assume that there's some kind of problem with the character encoding, but I'm not sure how to fix it. The registry file was originally emailed to me by my friend; I've just edited two copies of the original and emailed them back. The text editor I used (Metapad) is set to save the files as "DOS text", but I'm not sure if that matters as it's the filenames that are corrupt (I'm not sure about the contents).
My friend has Vista and uses Yahoo's webmail, while I'm using Windows 7, and I sent the email via Thunderbird which has the default character encoding set to Western (ISO-8859-1) for incoming and outgoing mail.
Can anyone help me understand what's going on here? :huh:
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Comments
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Something else I just noticed:... I can read the message I sent in my "sent" folder in Thunderbird, but if I click "forward" or "reply", the message opens in a new window and looks like it's been written in Mandarin.
So I guess the problem is with Thunderbird, then...?0 -
not really sure of the problem but if you zip/7zip them up and then send as an attachment for the other person to unzip, that might solve it.0
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I think I've discovered the problem. It looks like there's a bug in Thunderbird that causes the default character encoding of a particular message to change - sometimes it opens as UTF-16, other times as ISO-8859-1.
I've tried re-sending it as ISO-8859-1 again, so maybe that's sorted it for now.
Actually, I've just come across these few web pages and it seems that Thunderbird doesn't apply the default character encodings for some reason. Apparently the fix is to set mailnews.force_charset_override to true:
http://www.moorlandit.net/index.php/2010/07/thunderbird-character-encoding-139
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_3.0_-_New_Features_and_Changes#Removed_Preferences0
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