I have to say I am becoming ever more exasperated with Microsoft.

I have already posted about a number of problems which Microsoft could not solve but others , thankfully, have bee able to.

Now I suddenly get this irritating fault with Windows Live, which I use for all my email accounts.

For some reason certain punctuation symbols have become corrupted on incoming emails.

Thus:

don’t don’t shan’t “haven’t won’t “hello’s”

becomes:-

don’t don’t shan’t “haven’t won’t “hello’sâ€

I have gone into Windows Live options and I have changed the 'read' codes and fonts to every available alternative but the ' and the " are still corrupted.

I have Googled and found others have the same problem and have posted a query on the Windows forum, but Microsoft have not even bothered to reply.

Anyone have a similar problem or can offer a solution?

thanks

That issue is almost always to do with character sets which are how computers turn binary into different letters.

Since different countries use different letters and symbols, when computers became international a wide range of character sets were born to accommodate each countries variations.

Most character sets share the same characters for the first part (latin letters and numbers) and then fill in the remaining spaces with what they need.

If you try and read something with the software using the wrong character set you will get the issues that you described on many symbols and punctuation.

All web browsers will have an option to elect the character set, which is normally left on default so that the server providing the content can set the character set.

Since I avoid microsoft where possible I don't know which character set they default to but the most common is UTF8 or unicode.

Have a look in your browsers setting for character sets or encodings and try it on auto, UTF8 or some other options.

Auto is always best but when servers are not set up properly you sometimes need to override it.

Of course the problem could have been on the senders end, meaning it was broken before delivery, but this is unlikely if it happens on every email.

thanks for all that.

I omitted to mention in my first post that the problem only occurs in WINDOWS LIVE. If I log into my Gmail accounts directly or even into Hotmail Live,(as opposed to Windows Live), then the characters are shown correctly, so it is/was clearly a problem with my Windows Live set up.

I had already tried all the various code options under the 'read' tab to no avail.

This morning I opened the 'send' tab and changed the 'mail sending format' from 'HTML settings' to 'plain text settings'.

This seems to have done the trick and all the errant characters are now displayed correctly.

I have no idea why this would be as the problem was on incoming emails, not outgoing, but it works so problem solved. Must be a quirk in Windows Live. It used to be OK and it is only since *I upgraded that the problem appeared so I guess there is a bug in the upgrade.

About what I've come to expect from Microsoft.