Noticed that my emails have started to have odd characters

WebTop
1

With in the the last couple of months I have notice that I have started to see special characters after or in words. Kinda like when you turn on hidden characters in Word Perfect and Word, except this is in the emails that have been sent or received for me.

It looks like accented letters that would be used in a non-english language. So far the ones that I have commonly seen displayed in my emails are: Â and â € ™

The  usually happens before and after a sentence. Usually like one sentence out of the whole email, sometimes a line break, but not all line breaks - like one to three)

The ’ happen all together when a apostrophe is being used in a word like I’ve or don’t.

Here is an example of the strange characters in a email - I have add XXX to protect the company and users with privacy due to the nature of the email.

------- Beginning of Email -------

Hey XXX,

I hope you and your family had a pleasant weekend. I wanted to inform you that XXX is no longer employed at XXX. I’ve gone through her emails and don’t particularly see anything pressing that needs kept. However, to be safe, can you be sure her email is backed up? We’d like to delete her email and I’m not sure if she had any link to access her computer from a prior XXX download that still may exist? I need to be sure she no longer has any access to our system. If we go ahead and back-up then delete her email, will any future correspondence filter into the [xxx] email?? Please let me know.

Thank you,

Â

XXX,
Operations Manager

Â

Â

------- End of Email -------

As you can see it has special character artifacts somehow embedded in to the email. It seems to be coming from Webtop, so far that I can tell. Does anyone know what may be causing this and how do I fix or get rid of this issue?

Thanks,
-SF-

2

Which client was used to write emails?

3

Looks like a wrong encoding in the email. How were these mails generated? Did you try reading them from another PC and browser? How do you read them from an imap app on your phone?

4

Thunderbird is the email client.

5

Well. When I get a reply, or I reply to someone, usually it starts to have those extra characters - it does not happen all the time or to every email. I read them in Thunderbird. One of the people I send to has Outlook 365, in fact they were one of two people who had told me they would receive the emails with the odd characters and wondered if I knew about it. Both of them use Outlook.

6

I am still having issues…

The client used to write the email was Outlook. The client used to read and send reply was Thunderbird.

Thanks,
-SF-

7

Email replied and sent back to the user has the special characters in the email and the client is Outlook 365.

8

Can you manage to verify the charset of both clients?

1 Like
9

Sorry, I haven’t followed up in a while on this issue. I do appreciate the people who have tried to help. I haven’t seen the issue in a while. I believe somehow it is happening on my side with Thunderbird. Sending it to a client who is on Outlook 365. I am unaware of why it starts. I have only seen it between two customers and that is it. I have not been able to track it down. If I do find the reason for it I will definitely share.