OL97: Cyrillic Characters Changed to Question Marks

ID: Q198853

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Outlook 97

SYMPTOMS

Recipients of messages composed using the Cyrillic font see question marks rather than the text intended.

CAUSE

The message was sent with Plain Text set as the mail format.

MORE INFORMATION

To send and receive messages using the Cyrillic character set, the message needs to be in Rich Text Format (RTF). If at any point the Rich Text formatting is lost, the Cyrillic content may be converted to question marks, or to garbled characters. The steps in this article will help you troubleshoot problems sending messages using the Cyrillic font.

Set the Email Format to RTF

The first step is to discover where the Rich-Text formatting is being lost. To set the email format for the recipient to RTF, follow these steps:

In the Folder List, click to select your Contacts folder.

Open the contact in a card view by double-clicking the card heading.

Double-click the e-mail address, or using the right mouse button, click the e-mail address, and then click Properties.

Click to select, "Always send to this recipient in Microsoft Exchange rich-text format."

Click OK.

Click Save and then Close.

For more information on sending messages in Rich Text Format, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q160813 OL97: How to Specify RTF for Specific E-mail Addresses

Compose and Send a Message to Yourself Using Cyrillic Characters.

When you receive this message in your Inbox it should contain the proper formatting. If it does not, then this indicates that your SMTP/POP3 server does not support RTF, and you will need to contact your mail server administrator, or use a different mail service to send your Cyrillic messages.

If you are able to read Cyrillic messages that you send to yourself, but your recipients are still not able to do so, this indicates that either the mail server on the receiving end, or the receiving client can not handle RTF format, or is not correctly configured to handle Cyrillic messages. You may find it preferable to compose your message in a word processing program using Cyrillic characters, and then attach the document to the email message that you wish to send.

Additional query words: OL97


Keywords          : kbdta 
Version           : WINDOWS:97
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbprb

Last Reviewed: January 29, 1999