South Gosforth First School

The Problem

The automatic emailing system implemented at South Gosforth First School enables the school to copy their newsletters (and other announcements) and send them as text based emails to everyone who has subscribed to the Mailing List (via the form on the newsletter page).

Unfortunately, there can be a minor problem when these emails arrive. Sometimes the receiver does not see the message exactly as intended but sees strange strings of characters embedded in the otherwise readable message. e.g. as in the message below.

Message with Western encoding showing strange character strings replacing some characters.

The problem arises because MS Word uses a type of character encoding (representation) called Unicode UTF-8 and Outlook Express defaults to a character encoding scheme called Western European (or other non unicode scheme). UTF-8 boasts a larger range of characters and therefore allows richer formatting options e.g. Word's "Smart Quotes". These are not available in the non-unicode system. So, when Outlook Express displays the message, there are some characters that it doesn't know how to display, hence the strange strings of characters. You can see in the example above that it is struggling to show the ' and the - characters.

The Quick Solution

If you don't want to, or aren't confident about, changing the default behaviour of Outlook Express, then this is a quick way of changing the way this message is displayed. It doesn't mean all messages will be displayed in unicode, just the one which is selected when you carry out the instructions below.

In Outlook Express, select the message concerned and click on the menu item <Tools> and then <Encoding>. You should see something like the picture below:

Select the entry <Unicode (UTF-8)>. If you cannot see it in the list, select <More> and it should be listed in the next list down.

Once you've selected UTF-8, your message should then be displayed properly and should appear as in the picture below.

The font may be slightly different, but the important thing is that the strange character strings have now been displayed properly.

Changing the Default Behaviour of Outlook Express

The following procedure describes the process to modify the default behaviour of Outlook Express, so that it will use UTF-8 encoding on all emails unless another encoding scheme is specifically selected (as above but for a differnt encoding type).

Open Outlook Express and select <Tools> and then <Options>

This will open up the options dialogue box.

Setting Read Defaults

Select the <Read> tab.

Now click the button <Fonts> and the following box appears.

First select Unicode in the top list. Then change the Encoding (at the bottom of the box) to Unicode (UTF-8), if it doesn't show that already. If you wish to change the fonts or font size, you can change them here also.

Now click the <Set as Default> to save these settings as the default behaviour.

Setting Send Defaults

Select the <Send> tab

and then click the <International Settings> button.

Select the Default encoding to Unicode (UTF-8).

The default encoding scheme used by Outlook Express is now set to Unicode UTF-8.

Please Note

This is not a problem specific to MS Outlook Express (or Word).

It is a problem of encoding choices. Other email programs may exhibit the same behaviour. The solution for those programs will be something similar to the process described here.

MS Word and Outlook Express have been chosen to demonstrate the problem and solution, as they are probably the most frequently used word processor and email programs at the moment.

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