XFOR: Messages with Non-ANSI Characters Arrive with Garbage

E-mail messages arriving through the Internet Mail Service (US English) that contain non-ANSI characters such as DBCS (Japanese, Korean, and so on) may arrive with corruption or unusable characters such as squares or boxes in place of the originally intended characters. This can occur in messages using RTF or HTML objects as attachments.

The predefined RTF font table is always set to an ANSI character set. This causes non-ANSI characters to be converted into unusable or garbage characters.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem Microsoft Exchange Server version 5.0.

This problem has been corrected in the latest U.S. Service Pack for Microsoft Exchange Server version 5.0. For information on obtaining the Service Pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

Additional code added to Exchange Server version 5.5 allows an extra font in the RTF conversion table that eliminates this problem.