Message Character Set Conflict ?

Hi all. I have a friend with XP Home, and MSN 8. He has 2 screen names. When he writes or replies to email, he gets a pop-up window, that says Message Character Set Conflict. From that Pop-up, he must chose either "send as unicode", "send as is", or "cancel". I have never seen this message before, and am not sure if it's a Windows message, or MSN message. He said this has been popping up since he upgraded to MSN8, from MSN7. THE REAL STRANGE PART IS...........It ONLY occurs when he writes mail from ONE of his screen names. Never with the other one ?????? Anyone got any ideas what this is all about??? Brian

 

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Hope this helps. Find where it says "Message Character Set Conflict" on the page.

Send - New Mail or Reply
Nothing needs to be done in the New Mail case - KOI8-R was selected as a Default Encoding and thus it's already chosen to be used in the message preparation window - you can see it in the blue title bar of that window.
Reply is a little bit different and you need to be careful:
when you Reply, Outlook Express sets in the message preparation window an encoding used in the original message and not the Default Encoding.
(really, OE uses the current encoding of that message - if you changed already the original encoding of that message in Inbox or in Newsgroup window, then this encoding will be set by OE in the message preparation window)

For example, you've got e-mail sent from a Web-based service such as Yahoo! Mail or HotMail. As it was mentioned, such e-mail specifies encoding="Western" in it system header. And thus when you hit Reply, OE sets "Western" as a current encoding of your message preparation window.
(By the way, in the case of "Western" you will not see any encoding name in that blue title bar).

So, when you Reply, you must look what encoding is specified in that blue title bar of your message preparation window: if there is no encoding name (it means, the encoding is "Western") or you see there some encoding name but not KOI8-R, then you need to switch to KOI8-R:

Format/Encoding/Cyrillic(KOI8-R) and only then start typing.
(You need to do the same if you decided to use another Russian encoding as Default, for example, Windows(Cyrillic):
you must check whether this encoding is set in the message preparation window when you Reply and if it's not - change the encoding)

By the way, if you will not be careful during Reply and forget to change the encoding if it's an incorrect one, OE may present you a warning "Message Character Set Conflict".
In such case, just click on "Cancel" there, return back to your message and choose correct encoding.
Because if you select, in this warning dialog, "Send As Is" option, then you may produce the e-mail with only question marks ('?') instead of Russian:
if the encoding that is set in the message preparation window does not contain Cyrillic letters, then OE does let you type in Russian, but after you click on Send, it will replace all Cyrillic letters with '?'.
You could see it immediately - by looking into the SENT folder.
The explanation for this situation was given at the top of this page.



NOTE. All of the above written for the SEND mode (New Mail or Reply) is based in the assumption that in your text contains Russian+English only.
If you have any other language there, for instance, Russian/English + Polish and/or German, and/or Greek, etc. then the only way to do it is to send a Unicode message instead of a Cyrillic message:

In the menu of a message composition window, do Format/Encoding/Unicode(UTF-8) and only then start typing.
For the situation with only Russian+English in a message, using Unicode is not recommended - there is no need to use it while it may make message unreadable by some e-mail programs that don't understand Unicode.



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thanks for the info. FIXED!