> Harry, is it possible to have the MTA, check the character set setting > for the messages, and reset the specific ones back to the normal > settings? How? I don't know.
You could recode it in the MTA, but to what? US ASCII doesn't have enough code points to handle Mandarin, and you would compromise the meaning of the message. This is the reason we *have* MIME -- if it's properly tagged and/or encoded, the MTA has *zero* reason to mess with it. If the sender's MUA specifies eukr, then eukr is what should be presented to the receivers MUA. The MUA then makes the decision what to do with it. The MTA doesn't have enough information to do this correctly without destroying the semantics of the message. > But the fact is, the first message was > set to the sender's settings. The responder's was then set to the > sender's settings, and I haven't the slightest clew as to how that > happened. Outlook assumed that if the original message contained characters in a non-default character set, that the response was likely to also have characters in that set, and used the original message as a guide. I'd say that was a good call, although technically I suppose it should have created a separate body part tagged with the default character set for the person replying. Since UTF-8 is a superset of US ASCII, it was a pretty safe call to keep it there once Outlook had switched to UTF-8. -- db
