Thanks so much for showing me how to see a message's encoding! I believe I am
able to view all of the problematic messages now. The ones that did not work
with any of the Hebrew encodings work with unicode.

Is whether the Hebrew comes up or not at the beginning (before I use the
Encoding button) determined by the last encoding I used or by some default
setting?

How do I find the Message Source for a web page (or is there no such
thing?)? What do I do when the Hebrew is gibberish on a web page?

How might knowing "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit or 8bit or
quoted-printable or base64" help with encoding problems?

Many thanks!
Janet

"Michael Santovec" wrote:

You may want to take a look at the Message Source (Ctrl-F3) for some of
the messages. Compare the good ones to the bad.

Take a look for headers like:

Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="Utf-8"

The Charset is the MIME term for encoding. Here are some of the
Hebrew ones with the charset

Hebrew (DOS) - charset=DOS-862
Hebrew (ISO-Logical) - charset=-iso-8859-8-i
Hebrew (ISO-Visual) - charset=iso-8859-8
Hebrew (Mac) - charset=x-mac-hebrew
Hebrew (Windows) - charset=windows-1255

Also look for headers like
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit or 8bit or quoted-printable or base64



--

Mike - http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/techhelp.htm


"Janetb" wrote in message
...
"Michael Santovec" wrote:

Is the problem just with incoming messages or also with messages that
you are composing?

Just with incoming messages and some letters in some forums (IE6). No
problems writing.

Is the encoding option not opening, or not offering the option that
you
want or not letting you select the option that you want or something
else?

It opens and is again offering me all three Hebrew options, but the
different options just change the text from one sort of jibberish to
another.

Is the problem that the whole message gibberish, or just some
characters?

In the problematic messages, the whole message is gibberish.

You mention changing the default font. Did you also change the
default
encoding in Tools, Options, Read, International settings?

That setting has "Default encoding: Windows (Hebrew)", but the
"Windows
(Hebrew)" in the box is grayed out and there are no other options ie
no way
to change anything. I'm not sure whether to check or uncheck "Use
default
encoding for all other messages" because 99% of my emails are in
English and
my interface is in English--so I thought that might slow the computer
unnecessarily. In either case, the gibberish remains.
I had set Windows Hebrew as the encoding default in OEOptionsFonts.

Old emails which were perfectly fine before (in Hebrew) in my OE are
now
gibberish. Other old emails have remained fine (ie in Hebrew).

The problem is in forums in IE6 as well....Letters from a regular
contributor in a Yahoo group whose letters were fine in the past are
now
gibberish when they came to me in OE . I checked it on the Yahoo group
site
and it is gibberish there too....

Thanks for the help!
J.