Really Stumped

Question

Hello, recently I got a Blackberry and have a problem. I am using the Rogers service in Canada and they do not have Unicode support thus any emails I get in Russian show up as gobble-de-gook. I have done a lot of testing and figured out that I can open Microsoft word documents with Russian characters no problem as well as PDF documents with Russian text no problem. What I would like to do is set up Mail to create pdf files of certain email addresses or perhaps Microsoft word documents of these email addresses and send them to my phonne so that I can read and view them. Any thoughts on how to do this? Is extensive knowledge of Applescriptng required? Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm not sure how the network could be the problem, since message content is just binary data as far as it is concerned. If you are receiving the messages on the Blackberry, it seems more likely that its email program is the problem.
Be that as it may, you probably can create an AppleScript to convert & resend the messages as PDF or MS Word documents, but it won't be trivial, since Mail itself can't do the conversion & its support for creating attachments is questionable. Conceptually, one approach would be something like this:
1. Set up a rule in Mail with condition(s) that detect the messages to be converted. This might include adding a 'content-type' header to the conditions & testing if it contains any of the encodings already mentioned. Checking the "long headers" of some of your problematic messages will help with this.
2. Create an AppleScript for the rule's action. (See the scripts in /Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/Rule Actions for examples & help.)
3. The script will have to extract the part(s) of the message to convert, tell an appropriate app to make the conversion, & tell either Mail or the app to resend the converted message.