Aliens in my e-mails

Question

I have alien characters in my e-mails. Recipients find them dispersed randomly within the text of my e-mails, but I did not put them there. These aliens are not in the saved file copies of my e-mails. I would really prefer to not have them appear within the text that my friends receive. Here is an example from my experimental e-mail that was returned to me -- the “A with a hat” is the alien. There’s one after “e-mails?”, one after “Do you” and one after “characters?”. I didn’t do any of them.
Original message sent on the Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:48:23 -0400 by [email protected]
Herb, Sally, Marcy and Don --
Recall those "odd characters" you said were in
my e-mails? Â This is part of an experiment. I am sending
this e-mail to you via my SAFARI browser. Do you see those
pesky extra characters? I'll send this same content again
in another e-mail which will be sent via my AOL browser.
After you read both e-mails, please tell me if those
"odd characters" appear in either version. I'm just
thinking this might be a clue to the source of my "odd
characters".
I usually use SAFARI 3.1.2 with “FREE AOL Mail”, which is where the above example is from. With this experiment I discovered that if I send e-mails via AOL for Mac OS X Version 10.3.7 (ie., not using SAFARI) the aliens seem to stay away.
So my question is “What do I do to avoid the alien?”
It seems that not using SAFARI does that -- but why?
I kind of like using my SAFARI.
I have a Mac 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5 and Mac OS X Version 10.5.4
Bob

Answer 1

Hi Bob--
Robert Schoonover1 wrote:
to charlie ("Are you by any chance using a word processing program like MS Word..."?):
No. I compose my emails in AOL, or "SAFARI using Free AOL"; not in a WP. I also have tried a simple "cut-and-paste" using text received from others -- and always, if I send it using only AOL there are never aliens. But if I log onto SAFARI and send using "SAFARI with Free AOL" there are always alien characters.
I did a bit more looking around, and I think I know what it is: it's a bug in WebKit (which is what Safari uses to edit text). When you copy and paste, there's a bug that inserts a "non-breaking" space around where you pasted. Then, when your recipient opens the email, their email client isn't picking up the correct text encoding.
I was able to replicate it, too. I logged into my Netscape (AOL) webmail account and sent myself an email to another account. Then, I checked the mail in the other account using Apple's Mail program. If I look a the mail using the "Western (ISO Latin 1)" encoding from the "Message > Text Encoding" menu, I see your "alien" character. If I choose "Unicode (UTF-8)", the "aliens" go away. The default setting in Mail picks up that it's Unicode, so they don't show up...
They just didn't think it was a big problem and that it was due to the fact that I have Apple computers and they all have PCs. That comment started my little experiment, showing that it's related to SAFARI, but not AOL.
I think it's not so much that you have Apples and they have PCs. It's really a matter of their email software not picking up the correct encoding for the emails. As far as I can tell AOL is sending the right character encoding...
There are two work-arounds:
1. Change the outbound encoding: Log into your AOL web mail and go to your settings. Choose "Compose" from the left side. Look at the "Outbound Character set" setting. Try changing it to "Western (ISO-8859-1)" and see if the "aliens" go away in your friends' email clients.
2. Send only plain text messages: On the same page in your AOL webmail account settings, there's a checkbox for "Use Rich Text/HTML Editing". Make sure that's unselected. You won't have this problem, but your emails will all be plain text and you won't be able to use any fancy formatting.
3. Don't copy (or cut) and paste. But that seems kind of like going back to typewriters with white-out to me: not very practical.
I'm surprised from the replies that apparently no one else seems to have this same issue.
Actually, I have it all the time with Word docs people send me to post on our web sites. I spend a lot of time "fixing" their copy, but I've long ago stopped wondering about all the strange and wonderful characters that show up in my email. It's much better than it used to be: long ago, almost all emails would be full of all kinds of weirdness. Especially if they were forwarded or a reply from someone.
charlie