But - some of you might be able to tell me why, when I get the daily review of books from Powell's Books, I get odd (not weird) stuff: "There is naturally a bit of repetition between entries, as the story of Oregonâ??s northern border is also the story of Washingtonâ??s southern border." Why the strange punctuation and circumflex "a"s?
Sometimes emails that I receive that have been forwarded from an aol address do that kind of thing in my email box. I think it's some kind of incompatibility between the sender's email and yours, and that if it's in HTML code, they aren't using a universal standard, so your email reads them by the standard that they aren't following.
But Arnie or zmj can probably tell you more accurately, since they are actual IT wizards.
Wordmatic
Posts: 1390 | Location: Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
It has to do with how email travels from the sender's computer to yours. First it does not go directly, but makes a series of stops at other computer to try and find the intended recipient's machine. It all goes back to the '60s of the previous century when ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange, link) became a standard for character encoding: i.e., how the certain letter or digit was represented numerically for storage in memory. It was determined that only 7 bits were need to represent the codes, or 128 printing and non-printing characters in all. People wanted more characters and before we settled on Unicode as our new standard, people started using the extra bit (numbers on computers usually being stored in multiples of bytes, i.e., 8 bits, for an extra 128 characters. Some older software, on those in transit machines along the route, may be dropping the 8th bit and some of those extended ASCII characters, usually thinks like actual quotation marks (rather than inch signs) get converted into odd garbage. It's either that, a problem on how Pwoell's have set things up on their end, or how you've configured your email client to interpret the encodings of messages. You might be able to go into your configuration panel and change how incoming and outgoing email encodings are intrepreted. I've got mine set to UTF-8 (link) because I use all kinds of odd non-ASCII characters. You might look under configuration or encoding in the help for you email client.
