Outlook 97/2000 Symbols Issue

[RayWilson]

Hello,

A typical example of our problem would be me sending an email to another member of staff and the body of the message contains the £ symbol. The message would appear to send fine but the recipient would get a message where the £ symbol has been changed to a ?.

I sent myself an e-mail to my internal account from an external account (my yahoo account). This time the £ symbol was replace by the # symbol.

Any idea why this would happen? All users of our network are on Outlook 97.

Regards

R

 

[jbuchanangb]

Hello Ray.
This problem is a side-effect of the way ASCII character sets are implemented in different systems. British implementations use a code for £ which U.S. systems use for #.
As e-mail passes through the networks it can pass through mail servers which perform conversions. So sometimes the character you send as £ gets converted to # on the way.

(You can even see this if you compare keyboards. British keyboards have £ as "shift-3", but "shift-3" on U.S. keyboards gives you #)

It is strongly recommended that if you want to send a currency code through e-mail you should use the ISO 3-character code for the currency, such as GBP for Great British Pound or USD for United States Dollar.