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View Full Version : [Dixonary] Email status and problems as seen by JohnnyB


John Barrs
July 7th, 2005, 05:25 AM
Dear All

This is a bit technical, if you aren't intersted, cease reading here.

If you continue reading then please feel free to offer advice and other input

I have located a series of problems on my machine which may or may not affect whether different individuals get to see my emails

Firstly, as I have said before it is an American piece of hardware with XP-Pro installed on it when it was over there.
i) this impacts on the fact that because I wanted to spell correctly (oops!) I set it to UK English
ii) However, the keyboard is so designed that to get the keys I need I had to leave the keyboard in USA English

Secondly, for a variety of reasons I have to use MS Outlook, from Office 2003. I have set everything both ways, in and out, to use
only plaintext; to only use fixed font
i) However, the settings for each individual in the addressbook override that..so if Joe Bloggs is set to receive html then it
sends html
the choices are, plaintext, htnl, let Outlook decide
Outlook always defaults to 'let outlook decide'
so 'replies' to people not in addressbook are 'let outlook decide'
so sending to someone on the 'autocomplete list' are 'are let outlook decide'
...
Outlook always decides minimally on richtext, proportional font if not outright html
This problem means that unless I am extremely careful, people using the hmi software like Tapcis and Ozwin get blank emails with
attachments

ii) another thing that impacts is the encoding used and here I think I have located a real problem...
To overcome problem above I carefully set one of three encodings, 'Western European ISO', 'Western European Windows' or 'USA
ASCII'
Suddenly Guerri wasn't receiving my emails from the group .... And when I tried to communicate directly with her, contact was
refused because she would only receive western encodings
At the time I was set on 'USA ASCII'
(presumably when my offerings were sent to her via yahoo listserver it was receiving the rejection messages.)
A lot of investigation revealed that Outlook in my setup defaults to *Central* European
1) Set encoding to say Western European ISO
send to someone in my addressbook
look at setting - it is Western European ISO
2) Set Encoding to Western European ISO
send to someone not in my address book (reply or autocomplete)
look at setting - It is Central European
3) Set encoding to Western European ISO
close and reopen Outlook
setting is Central European

I thought it might be my peculiar settings so I reverted to USA english for keyboard and language
No difference. setting is Central European

I thought it might be the zonal setting so I reset my zone to USA
No difference.setting is Central European

I thought it maight be all the messing about I have done with this machine so I went to a restore point before I had the machine
No difference.setting is Central European

So... Short of changing machines altogether, I can merely do my best. I appologise for any failures in communication (this message
claims to be going in Western European ISO)


JohnnyB [using email; via corypaheus/yahoogroups]



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Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.10/43 - Release Date: 06/07/2005

Guerri Stevens
July 7th, 2005, 06:40 AM
John, I got the message from the Coryphaeus group, so presumably it
really was Western European as you intended.

I don't have any advice on what you can do to make things work properly
for all recipients. I have given up on that myself and have set
Thunderbird up to always send plain text. I don't know if some of my
recipients are annoyed or not. I haven't heard anything from anyone so
don't even know how my messages look when they are received by others.
If someone complains, then I will worry about it.

For what it's worth, in my research on messages you posted to the group
that I didn't receive, I found that this was not "sudden". It was
happening before June 20th, I just didn't know about it until I started
looking. And I decided not to bother figuring out all the messages that
did arrive and all that didn't. I figured that what was important was
*why* some messages weren't arriving.

I am pursuing the issue on my end, which is why tapcis.com Email is
rejecting certain messages because the coding isn't "western". Judy
Russell is going to pass information along to someone involved with
tapcis.com Email, which I think is Go Daddy. I wonder if there is anyone
else here who has a tapcis.com Email address and is receiving messages
from the group at that address. If so, those people are also missing
messages.

Thanks for your help with this. If it hadn't been for your willingness
to experiment, we would never have known why I wasn't getting your messages!

Guerri

John Barrs wrote:
> So... Short of changing machines altogether, I can merely do my best.
> I appologise for any failures in communication (this message claims
> to be going in Western European ISO)

Chris Carson
July 7th, 2005, 09:41 AM
John,

One thing I've noticed with Outlook is that when you are replying to a
message it seems to select that messages format to use when composing the
reply. That is, if you are replying to an HTML message then your message
will be HTML unless you explicitly change it. Same with Rich Text or Plain
Text. I'm not sure if that little 'feature' might figure into your
observations of the way things work or not. This behavior seems to override
whatever settings you have for composing mail. Unfortunately, Outlook and
Outlook Express have so many parameter settings involved with email that it
can be a real bear to figure out what's going on, as you are discovering.

Chris

Judy Madnick
July 7th, 2005, 11:43 AM
----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: "Chris Carson" <ccarson (AT) ix (DOT) netcom.com>
Subject: Re: [Dixonary] Email status and problems as seen by JohnnyB

<< One thing I've noticed with Outlook is that when you are replying to a
<< message it seems to select that messages format to use when composing the
<< reply. That is, if you are replying to an HTML message then your message
<< will be HTML unless you explicitly change it.

I have found the same thing with Express Plus -- but *only* if I haven't selected the option that all replies are to be in text format.

Judy Madnick
Albany, NY

John Barrs
July 7th, 2005, 03:08 PM
Chris

I only receive plain-text - leastways, that is what I see (in theory) In fact, although every last setting I can find is to
plaintextonly and every font set to fixed what I actaully see is
1. html originated - converted to plaintext but <grey> header says I can right-click to restore the html
2. some mail (depends on its coding) is seen fixed font
3. most mail (including - very frustratingly my own rflected back from Yahoo/Cory!!) is seen proportional font - ie the 'rich-text'
format

When I come to reply - and by the way the 'rules' for email specify that the sender defines what is sent - I always appear to be
composing in fixed font and I am set to Western European ISO but - as I said before - what appears to go depends on where I get the
address of the individual I am sending to - My addrsss-book (conatcs) are all set to plain-text and that is what they get. My
'replies' and 'Autocomplete' and 'hand entered' addresses are *always* 'let outlook decide' and it always decides 'rich-text' and it
*always* decides coding to be Central European ISO (but which even more frustratingly is US ASCII according to its headers but is
not recognised as a Western encoding - which US ASCII actually is)

So, frustration!!

JohnnyB [using email; via corypaheus/yahoogroups]

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Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.10/43 - Release Date: 06/07/2005

Chris Carson
July 7th, 2005, 06:57 PM
Frustration is right. I hate to sound like a dinosaur but things were so
much easier when ASCII was all there was. And as a bonus you didn't have to
worry about malware embedded in the messages.

Chris

John Barrs
July 8th, 2005, 07:51 AM
Chris

Another technical offering for the uninterested to cease reading here


I am absolutely convinced that the problem is in the language the machine was installed in. UK or USA Windows is critical.

I have just discovered that if this machine (American) machine is in eng-uk then when I try and import contacts in MSOutlook I get
no folders to import into, (the wizard just doesn't have anything in that area and because there are none then the wizard does not
have a 'next' button.) However; change to eng-us and all the folders are there etc

I also have an English made machine with english Windows XP which happily operates as I want it to in either language (eng-us or
eng-uk), therefore I deduce that the problem is Windows itself.

If that seems surprising a conclusion I have other evidence.
A few years ago (1993) I won a database speed shootout over here in the UK, my colleague in the US came 5th out od 7. In an attempt
to work out why, because we were using the data provided by PC Mag etc etc. we eventually physically switched machines... Either
side of the Atlantic, his original machine was slow, mine was fast - but they were both the same make and spec of machine. We then
FDISKED and reinstalled windows: Now the machine I had (originally his) was the fast one and the machine he had (originally mine)
was the slow one. The Only difference was the actual disks Windows was on. We deduced that USA Windows was the problem. SO we
switched product and 'sure enough'... So we went out and bought new product and switched them around between us and.. Sure enough
the results were completely reproducible (reproducable?)

OK, that was Win3.11 but since then I have seen other evidence, eg all the serious failures in cacheing occur on your side of the
pond; various setting that seem advised to necessary for databases to work over there are rarely used over here; some of my 'tips'
don't work over there; etc etc.

JohnnyB [using email; via corypaheus/yahoogroups]

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.10/43 - Release Date: 06/07/2005

Chris Carson
July 8th, 2005, 09:01 AM
John,

That's interesting. One would have to conclude that there are some
substantial internal differences between the Eng-UK and Eng-US versions of
Windows. What that might be, I have to idea but then I don't know what is
actually going on witht eh different languages in Windows. Intuitively you
would think there wouldn't be any difference at all other than a few
characters that are remapped and the spell checking changed to handle the
'ou' and other spelling differences. One guess I could make would be that
the UK version might be missing some of the 'overhead' that is installed by
default in the US version. A rough analogue would be the performance
differences in a Ferrari in Italy versus one with all of the California
emissions control hardware installed.

Chris

John Barrs
July 9th, 2005, 07:50 AM
Chris,

Your reply started me thinking about differences... As you said <quote>Intuitively you would think there wouldn't be any difference
at all other than a few characters that are remapped and the spell checking changed<endquote> but I do know of one other relatively
significant difference and I wonder what effects that might have. Any encryption coding above 128 length keys is restricted to USA,
(I notice our patches are 40/128) and therefore this could have a significant effect in areas where one might not expect it. (eg has
256 encryption even been written for Western European ISO or etc) code pathways might be quite different.
Also, the spell check changes are odd... From our side our programs can easily change to default to eng-us/eng-uk - but while it
is apparently easy to change this machine to eng-uk, in fact it is almost impossible to default it to eng-uk in the spell checkers.

I suspect that the thought is that us people will rarely want to change either encoding or spelling to something other than
<normal>, whereas over here .we have so many variants available

On this mc I have just used autoexec to set codepage to 44,856 - and now Outlook apparently is more obedient... We will see how long
it lasts!


JohnnyB [using email; via corypaheus/yahoogroups]

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No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.11/44 - Release Date: 08/07/2005