Microsoft KB Archive/244441

= OLEXP: Messages Received in Outlook Express Have Different Characters in the Text =

Article ID: 244441

Article Last Modified on 1/25/2007

-

APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.5
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.01 Service Pack 2
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.0
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.5
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.01 Service Pack 1
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.0
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.5
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.01
 * Microsoft Outlook Express 5.0

-



This article was previously published under Q244441



For information about the differences between Microsoft Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook e-mail clients, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

257824 OL2000: Differences Between Outlook and Outlook Express



SYMPTOMS
When you receive e-mail messages in Outlook Express, the message may contain different characters in place of extended ASCII characters as noted in the following example:
 * An exclamation point (!) may appear as +ACE-
 * A quotation mark (") may appear as +ACI-
 * An ampersand character (&) may appear as +ACY-
 * The @ character may appear as +AEA-
 * The # character may appear as +ACM-

Also, the e-mail messages may appear to contain these characters along with Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) coding for HTML e-mail messages.



CAUSE
This behavior can occur if Outlook Express is configured to read e-mail messages in the default encoding format regardless of the actual encoding format specified in the header of the e-mail message.



RESOLUTION
To resolve this behavior, disable the "Use default encoding for all incoming messages" feature:
 * 1) In Outlook Express, click Options on the Tools menu.
 * 2) Click the Read tab, and then click International Settings.
 * 3) Click to clear the Use default encoding for all incoming messages check box, click OK, and then click OK.



MORE INFORMATION
This problem typically happens when you receive a message in the UTF-7 encoding format and Outlook Express is set to use the default Western ISO encoding format for all incoming messages. The symptoms of this problem may be slightly different depending on the incoming message format type.

Keywords: kbui kbprb KB244441

-

[mailto:TECHNET@MICROSOFT.COM Send feedback to Microsoft]

© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.