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Character set not supported in Exchange Server 5.5 and in Exchange Server 4.0

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This article was previously published under Q157735

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Symptoms

When you use Microsoft Exchange Server, you may receive messages in your Inbox that are similar to the following:
This message was sent using a character set not supported on the Internet Mail Connector. The message text has been placed into the attachment: ATT00001.txt. To view, double-click on the attachment. If the text isn't displayed correctly, save the attachment to disk, and then use a viewer that can display the original character set.

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Workaround

To work around this problem, set the sending system to use a supported character set, for example, ISO-8859 or US-ASCII, or something found on the Internet Mail tab for the Internet Mail Connector (IMC).

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More information

To see which character set was used to send the message, open the properties of the message and click the Headers tab. Scroll down to the bottom and find the line that is similar to the following: 
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
If the character set that was used to send the message to Exchange Server is anything other than US-ASCII, the behavior in the "Symptoms" section of this article may occur. In compliance with RFC-1521, the character set that Exchange Server supports is US-ASCII.

A character set of X-roman8 or X-anything is not supported by the IMC.

Excerpt from RFC-1521:
No other character set name may be used in Internet mail without the publication of a formal specification and its registration with IANA, or by private agreement, in which case the character set name must begin with "X-".

Implementors are discouraged from defining new character sets for mail use unless absolutely necessary.

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Keywords: KB157735, kbprb

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Article Info
Article ID : 157735
Revision : 5
Created on : 10/28/2006
Published on : 10/28/2006
Exists online : False
Views : 376