Conclusion On Special And Ascii Characters In Email - When you compose any email with email client like thunderbird or outlook sometime they show up you some special or Ascii characters like =03. Those characters occurs in the mail message body and confuse you a bit.

I got hundreds of emails everyday and sometimes when i see every email show me something very odd which contain some special characters like @, #, * and some Ascii degits like “=03″, “=0D” those hexadecial degits always come with an equal sign. But what i did one day is i log on to the same email with web based email where i can see everything fine, Only i am getting this type of characters in my email clients such as thunderbird or outlook. What i can do about those characters so they wil not come in to the body of my message.?

Special And Ascii Characters In Email

Is this also happend with you too? I am sure sure that you are using your email client in Plain text mode isn’t it ? But question arise is this how we can get those type of characters on plain text? On plain text it should be text which we can understand.

Well if your are getting those type of characters then it means that “=03″ or any character which similar or have same type contains Ascii digit which is here in “=03″ is 03. This is a another
charecter of word but because of your setting of email client you are viewing it as “=03″ in place of the real exact word.

This happen because of the encoded technique which you are using on your email client. Here are some of the examples of those special and Ascii look funny characters.

• |X| those characters occurs because of (checked) “Quoted Printable”.
• |_| those characters occurs because of (cleared) None
• |_| those characters occurs because of (cleared) Base 64
• As i told you that every character like “=03″ Has some meaningful character like Here is an example below.
• There is  string of funny Ascii characters “=41=73=21=6B” Which means “asok”. you can
  also get those type of strings which have some meaningful word.

What is Quoted Printable in email message

It is some type of encoding method pattern which tells the specific email client wheather the line of the message has to print or not. It totally depends on the email client that it show the Quoted Printable character to user or not. Here are some of the non alphanumeric character which means that the specific line is non printable those special characters are CR and LF.

Now here are the solution for outlook and thunderbird which you can use to overcome this ascii and special character problem in email.

Solution on outlook for ascii and special characters in message body of email

• Go to “Tools” menu and then select the “options” item.
• In the options now select the “Send” tab.
• Under the send tab select the “Mail Sending Format”
• Now go to “Plain Text Settings” and make sure that In the “MIME” message format is selected.
• Under the MIME message format you will see the ““Encode text using” tab select the option “None” in it.

That is how you can overcome the special and ascii character displaying problem in the message body of your email in outlook.

Now lets think about the thunderbird how you can overcome the special and ascii character not visible in the message body.

Solution on Thunderbird for ascii and special characters in message body of email

• In thunderbird go to “Tools”
• And in the tools menu selet the “Options” item.
• Now in the options item select the “Composition” tab from the main menu.
• Now make sure that in the General tab “For message that contain 8-bit characters, use ‘quoted-printable’ MIME encoding” checkbox is “Uncheck”

That is how you can overcome the problem of special character or ascii character on body part of the message.

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