KSW Industries Inc. (fka KSWJ)

[calgarylady]

This will explain how to write a letter in Russian if you are using Outlook Express. If you use Outlook you shouldn't have a problem..

# Reading Russian e-mail in Inbox:

In the menu, do View/Encoding/Cyrillic(KOI8-R), and if it's still unreadable, then try another Russian encoding: View/Encoding/Cyrillic(Windows)

# Sending Russian e-mail via New Mail or Reply:

In the menu of a message composition window, do Format/Encoding/Cyrillic(KOI8-R) and only then start typing.

By the way, if a user does not do the above change in Format menu, then s/he may produce those famous messages where one sees only question marks ('?') instead of Russian letters.
This sender could see it immediately - by looking into the SENT folder.

The reason is that an input pane is a Unicode window and works as Word 97/2000 - language changes when keyboard mode changes: "RU" - input Russian, "EN" - English, etc.
During the input, the currently selected in OE encoding does not play any role.
Most of such users have "Western" as a current encoding.

Now, the input is over and a user clicks on "Send". At this time currently selected encoding is critical:

* the text that user typed is a Unicode text. Now OE needs to convert this text to the currently selected encoding
* OE is trying to convert from Unicode to "Western".
Unlike Unicode, "Western" does not contain Cyrillic letters, and thus OE inserts regular question marks ('?') instead of Russian letters. Placing a question mark means the following:
"Symbol is not found in the target encoding".

If this user had a current encoding that does contain Cyrillic (Unicode(UTF-8), Cyrillic(KOI8-R), Cyrillic(Windows)), then it would be no question marks instead of Russian letters, because the conversion would end successfully.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/oe_e.htm