Entourage, send mail and diacritical signs

[Ano Nimus]

Hi all,

Using a German speaking OS 10.4.2 and MS Entourage.

In the database, I have a text field in which I sometimes type text directly and sometimes copy and paste text from other sources. If I use the script step Send Mail to put the content of this field into an email, it is put into my drafts. There, the mail looks fine, exactly as it is in the field.

When I then send the mail, two things happen:

on top of the received mail the following info is added:

Mime-version: 1.0

Content-type: text/plain

charset="ISO-8859-1"

Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable

furthermore, diacritical signs (such as ä, ö, ü and ß) are being translated to some sort of encoding I don't know:

ä becomes =E4

ü becomes =FC

and there are also a couple of =20 at the end, they could be returns.

If I type these signs directly in Entourage, there is no problem, it just occurs if these signs came from FileMaker.

Does anybody have an idea about what might be going on here?

Thanks,

Ano

Edited December 2, 2005 by Guest

[T-Square]

Those text strings are the Hexadecimal representations for those "non-standard" characters. I'm not sure which program is putting them in, or why you see them sometimes.

I just started exploring the Open URL script step using a mailto URL, which will open your email program and pass it the parts of an email; I have created a custom function that takes a field and strips out various special characters and replaces them with their Hexadecimal equivalents. You might look into trying that approach out.

HTH,

David

[Ano Nimus]

Thanks, T-Square.

It turned out that the problem was gone as soon as I cloned the database (which I received from the UK) on a German system. It seems that FM embeds some stuff in the db that throws a German Entourage off when sending.