Students using a foreign language or non-Roman characters on their computers sometimes receive E-mail messages which are in gibberish or unreadable. This mostly occurs when one uses a Web-based E-mail system such as Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo, or Excite.
When this probelm occurs, the culprit is usually that the document encoding is not set correctly. Microsoft's Internet Explorer tends to handle foreign language characters better than Netscape Navigator, but the process is the same for both programs.
To change the character set:
1. Launch your web browser and navigate to your Web Mail site.
2. Login to the site and bring up your Inbox.
3. Click on the E-mail message that you are having trouble reading.
4. From the menu bar, point to "View" and select "Character Sets". A listing of all character sets that your browser can handle appears.
Use the following common language encodings for the following languages:
- European Languages - Western (Latin1)
- Russian - Cyrillic KOI-8R
- Japanese - Auto Detect or Shift-JIS
- Chinese - Simplified Chinese
5. Select the language encoding from the list. The characters should then appear in a readable language.
6. If characters in your target language are still unreadable, select another related language encoding to see if you can transform the characters into readable text.
If none of the encodings work, then the document cannot be read in its original form. Either the original sender of the message must resend it in a transliterated or phonetic form or you must select a web browser that has more comprehensible language encoders.
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