Hi - this is my first post, this forum has come highly recommended to me so I hope you can help.

I help run a fansite. We have the site set up with one host, but because the message boards offered with the site wouldn't have worked for us, we set up the forums with a free forum host.

We send out a weekly newsletter and this week it was my turn to do it. Because the members aren't all registered on both the forums and the site, the newsletter gets sent out from both places.

The email I sent from the site was received by everybody as it was sent. The email from the forums however just came out a garbled mess, which is obviously less than ideal.

I have never had this problem with my own email account before (Outlook Express 6) so it didn't occur to me that it could be my settings. I took it up with the forum host, and they said that it wasn't a scripting problem, and that it was my computer settings causing the problem.

With that in mind I tried to sort it out - BIG mistake - now all of my emails from the forum (topic reply notifications etc) are coming through garbled. Interestingly, it is only the emails from the site that are messed up, nothing else is affected.

Can anybody tell me what my settings should be, particularly my international mail settings, so that I can put them back to how they were? Or does it sound like there is some sort of conflict with the forums?

I would be so grateful for any help, it's driving me mad now

Thanks in advance!

Hi, welcome to the D-A-L Forums

I'm sure that someone can help you get to the bottom of this but, firstly, I think we just need to clarify a couple of points.

You've said a couple of times that 'the newsletter gets sent out from both places' and that you sent an email 'from the site' that was successful and a different email 'from the forums' that was incomprehensible when it was received. Are you really using a function of the web site package and forum package to send newsletters using your web browser, e.g. Internet Explorer? Or are you getting a copy of the email addresses and then sending emails to those addresses through Outlook Express? If you're sending messages through a browser, then changing Outlook Express settings should make no difference at all.

Further into your explanation, you said that topic reply notification emails are coming through garbled. Do you mean that if you reply to a thread in the forum, then the email that you receive cannot be understood but that the email is sent automatically by the forum software? If this is the case and emails from other senders are being received by you correctly, then the forum host is talking complete rubbish and they have a problem that they need to resolve!

Thank you for the welcome!

I was thinking the same, that there must be a forum problem - I composed the newsletter in Word, then copied and pasted it into the email sending facilities (sorry, I have a really bad cold, can't think of correct phraseology!) of both the forum and the site, so I was bemused as to how Outlook Express came into it at all, from that point of view. And there's nothing in Internet Explorer that would affect it, is there?

The thing is, if anybody else does the newsletters, they come out ok, which is why I am so confused.

With regard to the forum topic reply notfications that I receive - it's pretty much the same as here, I get an email saying "There has been a reply to the topic" etc - in fact, I just found an example so you can see what I get - "Subject: Topic Reply Notification - ROB'S £1.5M GIFT" - it's only a small example in that the pound sign has been replaced (incidentally, I don't get emails notifying me of a reply if I reply on the forum, just if somebody else does). But on the forum, it appears correctly. But I think that's happening because I messed with my Outlook Express settings after the newsletter debacle because it was fine up until then - now I just need to know what they should be set at so I can put them back to normal.

I'm sure it's a forum issue though because all of my other emails are coming through ok - but why is it only happening when I send the newsletters out?

Did any of that make any sense???

Yes, I think you're making sense! It's always more complicated trying to read about two potentially unrelated problems at the same time though

Let me just read it all again and have a think about it for a minute!

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OK, I'm assuming that when other forum admins send out the newsletters, they are using their own PCs. Right?

When the other forum admins send the newsletters, do they also compose it all in Word and then copy it into the appropriate area of the forum? If so, what version of Word have you got and what are they using? Maybe there's something that works differently in your version. Microsoft have tried to make Word an "all things to all men" kind of application by making it an HTML editor. It's not that good at it. I use Word 2003 and, when I copy something from a web site into a blank Word document, it normally comes out pretty good but I know that earlier versions used to give all kinds of results. Likewise, when you construct a document in Word and save it as HTML, Word puts pages and pages of bloated code at the top which you wouldn't get if you were writing in Notepad or a dedicated HTML editor.

I'll assume that the other forum admins use Internet Explorer. Were you doing it in a different web browser such as Firefox?

I'd rather get this issue worked out and then come back to the Outlook Express problem separately as it will avoid it getting confusing. However, I will think about that issue as well briefly. When you said that all of your other emails are coming through correctly (towards the end of your post), did you mean that the other newsletter that you sent worked OK or did you mean that emails that you have received from various different senders have not shown the language / character problem that is present in the topic reply notifications that you get from the forum? If you meant the latter, could you get someone to send you an email with that same subject line that you gave as an example (or, if you have a Hotmail account or one that you can access from the Internet, perhaps send yourself the email back to your regular email address). I'd like you just to prove or double-check that the pound sign appears correctly. If it comes out incorrectly when other people send you a message with the same subject line, then the problem is in your language or 'character set' settings in Outlook Express. If the problem really only appears in emails that the forum sends out, then the problem is in the forum.

Hope that helps

Ok, I just sent myself an email from my Hotmail account, and the pound sign came out properly. Then I had a lightbulb moment and sent the same email to myself from my main account on Outlook Express, and guess what, there was that pound sign again, clear for all to see. So presumably I have somehow righted my settings within OE, would you agree?

The other forum admin who sends out the newsletters uses her own computer. She is on AOL though so it's not a like for like comparison; I don't know much about AOL but they don't use Internet Explorer as their browser, do they?

I use Internet Explorer 7, just so as you know.

The thing is, everybody else who gets topic replies on the forum gets them properly - at least, I think they do, perhaps I had better ask, but nobody has complained.

When I brought it up initially with the forum host, this is the reply I got, if it is any use to you:

This is the reponse I received from the script owner about the unicode issue:

This issue does not relate to echoPHP MF, we don't control this. If users send unicode message, please tell them view it under charset encoding utf-8 or utf-16.

For details: view message -> change browser character encoding.
- For IE: Tool Bar -> View -> Encoding -> Unicode (utf-8) (or More -> Unicode (utf-8))

It must be the forum, mustn't it. I did exactly the same for the site newsletter, just copied and pasted it from Word, and it was perfect.

I'm so glad I joined this forum - no problem is too small, and I am exceedingly grateful!

Originally Posted by angeleyes66

......So presumably I have somehow righted my settings within OE, would you agree?

Yes, it sounds like OE is running just fine. If you continue to receive messages with the wrong character set, then it's a forum problem.

Originally Posted by angeleyes66

The other forum admin who sends out the newsletters uses her own computer. She is on AOL though so it's not a like for like comparison; I don't know much about AOL but they don't use Internet Explorer as their browser, do they?

No, her PC has now been completely taken over by AOL's browser, dialler and all kinds of other stuff

Originally Posted by angeleyes66

The thing is, everybody else who gets topic replies on the forum gets them properly - at least, I think they do, perhaps I had better ask, but nobody has complained.

You might be surprised. If you raise it as an issue, you might find lots of other people that say "yeah, I've got that problem but I thought it was just my Outlook Express settings" !

Originally Posted by angeleyes66

This is the reponse I received from the script owner about the unicode issue...................

That didn't mean a great deal to me to be honest. However, you should check the Internet Explorer unicode settings on your PC as they suggested.

Originally Posted by DJNafey

If you raise it as an issue, you might find lots of other people that say "yeah, I've got that problem but I thought it was just my Outlook Express settings" !

I've posted a message asking for people to report back to me. Makes me feel important if nothing else!!

Originally Posted by DJNafey

That didn't mean a great deal to me to be honest. However, you should check the Internet Explorer unicode settings on your PC as they suggested.

That's what got me into this trouble in the first place!! LOL! I don't know what they are supposed to be, but I THINK they're right now, I'm not messing with them again!!

I'll keep you posted, thank you for all of your help

Originally Posted by angeleyes66

I don't know what they are supposed to be, but I THINK they're right now

I'm running Internet Explorer 6 SP2 so you might have different options in IE7. However, in IE6 at least, the default setting for us in the UK is "Western European (ISO)".

Hope that helps. I'll now close the thread as I think that we've concluded that there isn't a great deal more that we can do to assist and that it's something going on with the forum. But, if you want to us to re-open the thread again later, feel free to send me or one of the other moderators a Private Message and we'll re-open it again. Alternatively, if you get some advice or feedback from the people that support the forum and you can't make sense of it or want a second opinion, it might be useful for you to create a new thread in the message board that we have for web site issues.

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If you started this thread and the problem returns or the case has not been properly Resolved, please send a Private Message to a Moderator of this forum to have the thread opened again. If you have a different problem, please start a new thread.
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