Hi David and Dan, I think the explanation is that you're looking at mail that contains non-ASCII text characters, or which is replying to non-ASCII text characters. The original mail protocols only allowed for 7-bit ASCII text characters, so any characters with accents, Unicode representations of non-English fonts or accents like German umlauts, or even some symbols on your keyboard that are represented as 8-bit ASCII encoding.
What happens when attachments get sent is that the mail program tries to force both the message and the attachment, which might be binary data, into transformed ASCII text, and it doesn't always do this correctly. Most of the problems come when you're sending mail between two different platforms. I'll bet that none of your problem emails come from other Mac users, and that you're more likely to see this problem if you're communicating with people who use Outlook or Outlook Express. I think there are also some problems with Yahoo mail. So, while you're likely to see this problem with any special characters in the email (foreign accents, etc. and especially if the original sender used rich text format instead of plain text), you're more likely to see this problem if there's an attachment that forces the other mail program to do an ASCII text conversion -- which it probably doesn't manage properly. The best solution is for everyone to use plain text, and that's why Mike Babcock's suggestion of converting to plain text is a good way to deal with things. This actually goes both ways -- folks who receive your email and who use Outlook or Outlook Express might have problem character translations. Here's a recent article about this: http://tekkie.flashbit.net/mac-os/changing-apple-mail-default-encoding-to-unicode <begin excerpt> If you’ve ever used Apple Mail for sending an email that has special characters in it, e.g. umlauts or any other characters that are not part of the basic Latin alphabet, you might have noticed that replies on those particular emails include weird and unreadable characters despite the fact that you didn’t enter any of those. This is the case with all the replies from MS Outlook or Outlook Express users. <end excerpt> They suggest you fix this by going to terminal and typing: defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8" but I think that Leopard uses a new syntax: defaults write com.apple.mail LeopardPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8" If you want to read more about the background of this problem, look at: http://tekkie.flashbit.net/mac-os/changing-apple-mail-default-encoding-to-unicode That article described the problem of what Outlook and Outlook Explorer mail users saw when they received mail from Macs (even back in Tiger). It gives some examples of how Outlook Explorer will "mistranslate" the characters that get sent back to you in a reply when there is an accent mark and ASCII text translation is forced. The problem goes back even farther to the old USENet days, when posts had to be UUencoded and UUdecoded to enforce a standard ASCII conversion protocol. Hope this helps as a partial explanation of the problem. Cheers, Esther
