Computer Nerd Help Needed

[JohnRich 4]

I'm sending out an html e-mail from a club web site with black-dot bullet points that looks like this:

• Next Meeting Announcement:
• Last meeting minutes:
• New Members:

When it arrives in my Outlook Express e-mail in-box, it looks like this:

• Next Meeting Announcement:
• Last meeting minutes:
• New Members:

There's some kind of code translation going on that's screwing up my bullet point symbols. I do this every month, and this is the first time I've had a problem like this.

Does anyone know what might be going on?

[Amazon 7]

Airballs instead of bullseyes??

[quade 4]

Quote

I'm sending out an html e-mail from a club web site with black-dot bullet points that looks like this:

• Next Meeting Announcement:
• Last meeting minutes:
• New Members:

When it arrives in my Outlook Express e-mail in-box, it looks like this:

• Next Meeting Announcement:
• Last meeting minutes:
• New Members:

There's some kind of code translation going on that's screwing up my bullet point symbols. I do this every month, and this is the first time I've had a problem like this.

Does anyone know what might be going on?

Email and HTML sometimes just don't play well with one another. Email wasn't originally designed for anything other than plain text ASCII and because of that anything beyond it is simply a "gift" of whatever system you happen to be using and wherever the email is routed through.

Bullet Points aren't something that's 100% guaranteed to work.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[format 1]

Why wouldn't you use web mail at home too?
Then copy & paste. Just a thought.

What goes around, comes later.

[Arvoitus 1]

It gets encoded in UTF-8 at some point but since Outlook should support UTF-8 encoding the information that the message is encoded in UTF-8 is probably lost at some point.

If the website you're using to send the mail itself doesn't support UTF-8 and your browser sends the data in UTF-8 then there is not a lot you can do, unless the website can be modified.

Your rights end where my feelings begin.

[regulator 0]

By default, SMTP does not support transporting 8bit data, like UTF-8. Either the SMTP server has to support 8BIT extensions to the SMTP protocol and the client has to request their use, or the email has to be encoded in a 7bit-friendly transport encoding instead, such as base64 or quoted-printable

[Arvoitus 1]

True but in this case it seems like an encoding issue.

If you copy-paste the bullet char from John's message and save it into a UTF-8 encoded text file it will contain (in hex) the following : E2 80 A2 which is the bullet character encoded in UTF-8.

And if you then take the 3 bytes and look them up from CP-1252 (which is, as far as I know, what Outlook will use by default if it doesn't know the encoding) you'll have :

E2 = â
80 = €
A2 = ¢

Your rights end where my feelings begin.

[JohnRich 4]

Quote

Why wouldn't you use web mail at home too?
Then copy & paste. Just a thought.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

The e-mail is from my canoe club web site, and I have to use the web site host software to send out blast e-mails to all the club members. So I'm stuck with their system for sending the e-mails.

I've tried sending the bullet from my own Outlook e-mail back to myself, and it is retained correctly and does not transform into gibberish. So that seems to rule out that the problem is in my own computer's Outlook Express e-mail settings, or my e-mail web host system.

I also tried sending the test message using two different web browsers, and in both cases the bullets were received as gibberish. So that seems to rule out just one web browser having some incorrect setting.

I've been sending out these bulleted e-mails monthly for several years now, and this is the first time it's gone haywire on me.

I now suspect there has been some change on the web host software, that doesn't handle unicode characters in e-mail. They made some web site "improvements" recently. I'll post a note in the help section there, but they are very slow to respond.

And I've got a newsletter to send out to several hundred people... I'll have to change my bullet points to something standard like a hyphen, and it just won't look quite as good.

Thanks everyone for all the advice received so far!

[Amazon 7]

[huge 0]

Just make sure that the HTML contains

• blahblah

tags for the list and bullet points. That should avoid all the issues with encoding, UTF8 and 7/8-bit. For example:

Next Meeting Announcement:

Last meeting minutes:

New Members:

If the webmail doesn't allow you to enter HTML formatting manually, you are out of luck

[JohnRich 4]

Quote

Just make sure that the HTML contains

• blahblah

tags for the list and bullet points. That should avoid all the issues with encoding, UTF8 and 7/8-bit. For example:

Next Meeting Announcement:

Last meeting minutes:

New Members:

If the webmail doesn't allow you to enter HTML formatting manually, you are out of luck

Yeah, I thought about unordered lists, but that creates additional issues with indentation and line-spacing. I may have to go with that in the future though, and add the parameter to limit the indentation.

I also thought about just making a tiny little image file of a bullet point, and embedding the image in the front of each line where I want it.

I just hate having to monkey with work-around solutions, when this is something that's been working for me already for years. Grrr...

[quade 4]

Quote

Just make sure that the HTML contains

• blahblah

tags for the list and bullet points. That should avoid all the issues with encoding, UTF8 and 7/8-bit. For example:

Next Meeting Announcement:

Last meeting minutes:

New Members:

If the webmail doesn't allow you to enter HTML formatting manually, you are out of luck

The thing is, not all email readers will translate HTML and also frequently they have the option for users to turn HTML formatting off (that's actually not a bad idea if you're worried about security issues), so that also isn't a guarantee of this being formatted on the receiving end the way you'd want them to be.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[format 1]

You seem to be persistent in posting a poem:

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry". John Cage (1912 - 1992)
Don't you dare to use your admin privilege!

to JohnRich:
Insist on easy_working symbols, make a fashion out of it (like bill_von_novak_does),
screw the bullets until the world becomes 'uniform' AKA "never'.

What goes around, comes later.