Missing characters in emails (outlook)

[doghandler]

I have just started using outlook for my emails, (i used to use outlook express).

I now find, regardless of font, that when the mail is sent, outlook changes certain characters, mostly ' and - to little square boxes - they are fine when typed but are replaced when sent?

I dont think it's the spell checker doing it - as if i run a spell check before sending that doesnt alter them?

Also, despite ticking the box marked 'remember my password', the program keeps throwing up a confirm password box, how on earth do i stop these things happening, i need to know or i'm going back to outlook express!

Any help would be appreciated.

[gen2]

I use 'Outlook Express' myself so cannot help directly but I can offer a few suggestions.

The reason for your problem is because the emailer cannot handle smart quotes (curly apostrophes and curly quotes) and also cannot handle dashes.  I would expect that it would also reject accented characters such as � � � �.
Programs like MS Word default to automatically changing straight quote marks to smart quotes.  It also changes hyphens to dashes when used between words with spaces either side.  In MS Word you can stop it from automatically replacing these characters by going to the tools menu / auto correct options / auto format and cancel the replacement of straight quotes with smart quotes and hyphens with dashes.

I would expect there to be a similar setting in whatever text editor you are using to compose your emails.

Your emailer may also have a setting that needs to be switched on that will allow it to handle these extra characters.  It may be called something like 'enable extended ASCII'.

Maybe someone who uses 'Outlook' can give you more specific advice.

[Ralph]

I suspect your character encoding options need looking at. Click Tools...Options and click the International Options... button. Change the "Preferred encoding for outgoing messages" to Western European (ISO). If that doesn't work, try a couple of the others that sound like they might be right (ie. not Estonian!). After you click OK twice to get back to the main Outlook window, the changes should be immediately obvious.

As for your password, I vaguely recall having this problem if Outlook tried to use a dial-up connection initiated by a different program, such as Internet Explorer. My solution was to check my email first, so that clicking Send/Receive initiated the dial-up connection. This is quite a bit of a bodge and may be well wide of the mark, particularly if you're on broadband, but worth mentioning.

[doghandler]

Thanks Ralph & gen2,

Your idea for the missing symbols worked Ralph - for anyone else reading this with the same problem - the setting that worked for me (after a lot of trial and error) is unicode utf-7.

What a stupid program where english doesnt work as a default?

As for the password problem - that still stays as i was connecting to the net via outlook already and its a broadband connection anyway - but thanks for the offer.