Sometimes when I send an email the person I send it to sends it back to 
me asking why there are question marks (?) all over the place. It seems 
that somehow where I have typed single or double curly quotes, a 
question mark gets substituted. Does anyone know what I could be doing 
wrong or is it a case of random tachyons from the sun buggering things 
up.

I use a Mac and the person I am referring to uses a PC

In article <catland-627A9F.05162011072007@news.optusnet.com.au>, Andrew
Gara <catland@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Sometimes when I send an email the person I send it to sends it back to 
> me asking why there are question marks (?) all over the place. It seems 
> that somehow where I have typed single or double curly quotes, a 
> question mark gets substituted. Does anyone know what I could be doing 
> wrong or is it a case of random tachyons from the sun buggering things 
> up.
> 
> I use a Mac and the person I am referring to uses a PC

Your mail program is set to use a different text encoding than the
recipient's.

What email program, and what version?

On 2007-07-10 15:20:48 -0500, Dave Balderstone 
<dave@N_O_T_T_H_I_Sbalderstone.ca> said:

> Your mail program is set to use a different text encoding than the
> recipient's.

It's probably a Windows email client without Unicode support.

-- 
JR

In article <catland-627A9F.05162011072007@news.optusnet.com.au>,
 Andrew Gara <catland@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> Sometimes when I send an email the person I send it to sends it back to 
> me asking why there are question marks (?) all over the place. It seems 
> that somehow where I have typed single or double curly quotes, a 
> question mark gets substituted.

Correct.

The email system was designed only to send 7-bit ASCII text; that's all 
most mail servers are capable of. Anything that is not 7-bit ASCIi text 
(this includes curly quotes and foreign language/accented characters) 
goes bye-bye.

-- 
Photography, kink, polyamory, shareware, and more: all at 
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

tacit wrote:

> Correct.
> 
> The email system was designed only to send 7-bit ASCII text; that's all 
> most mail servers are capable of. Anything that is not 7-bit ASCIi text 
> (this includes curly quotes and foreign language/accented characters) 
> goes bye-bye.

See

  http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1652

What you say hasn't been the case for more than a decade.

What can happen is that something that generates the mail fails to state
the character set and encoding properly.

To diagnose this particular problem I'd need to see one of the
problematic messages.

-j

In article <139852s24l1eg4c@news.supernews.com>,
 Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> wrote:

> What you say hasn't been the case for more than a decade.
> 
> What can happen is that something that generates the mail fails to state
> the character set and encoding properly.

Jeffrey-

You are probably correct.  However, it might just be a vestige of the 
differences between Apple and Microsoft.  Those 8-bit characters, not 
being part of the original ASCII definitions, were defined differently 
by the two companies.  I expect that curly quotes may fall in that 
category.

I've had problems with text that originated in Microsoft Word.  For 
example, in Word for Windows you can type a one, fraction bar, 2.  Word 
immediately converts the three to a single character displayed as a 
"one-half" character.  When opened by an older version of Word for 
Macintosh, that character is displayed as the omega symbol, Ω.  (What do 
you see, an omega, a one-half or something else?)

Fred

Fred McKenzie wrote:
> In article <139852s24l1eg4c@news.supernews.com>,
>  Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> wrote:
> 
>> What you say hasn't been the case for more than a decade.
>>
>> What can happen is that something that generates the mail fails to state
>> the character set and encoding properly.
> 
> Jeffrey-
> 
> You are probably correct.  However, it might just be a vestige of the 
> differences between Apple and Microsoft.  Those 8-bit characters, not 
> being part of the original ASCII definitions, were defined differently 
> by the two companies.  I expect that curly quotes may fall in that 
> category.

Yes.  But there is a solution to this problem (which Microsoft is not
all that good at implementing).  When one system produces something that
isn't 7bit ASCII it is supposed to say what the character set is.  So
the sending system should then know how to interpret non-ASCII characters.

The sending system should put in an appropriate Content-Type header, like

   Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

or whatever the character set is.

> I've had problems with text that originated in Microsoft Word.  For 
> example, in Word for Windows you can type a one, fraction bar, 2.  Word 
> immediately converts the three to a single character displayed as a 
> "one-half" character.  When opened by an older version of Word for 
> Macintosh, that character is displayed as the omega symbol, Ω.  (What do 
> you see, an omega, a one-half or something else?)

I see it as Omega (Uppercase version of the last letter of the greek
alphabet).

I see that MT Newswatcher that you used to send the message didn't
include a Content-type header.  That is a no-no.  So my system had to
guess or rely on a default (I've set my Thunderbird default to UTF-8.)

Newsreaders tend to comply much more poorly to the relevant standards
than Mail clients.  Could you send me mail, jeffrey@goldmark.org, with
some of these characters in it and I'll see what charset (if any) is set
by a Content-type header (if any).

-j

I also get this phenomenon - they are at the end of the line (5 of
them typically) - the body (or the text) (content of the email) is
often cut and pasted from Excel.  Once I have this, I then try some
tests but I can't reproduce it - even following what I think is the
exact way it happened the first time.  As with Andrew - typically it
is email to a PC user.  We use Apple Mail with an Apple Server running
the mail server (10.4.9), we have had this for a while, perhaps since
10.4.7.