Some help from international list members?

[Steve]

---  "Kelley" <kelley_thompson at ...> wrote:
>
> Hi, everyone--
> 
> I'm hoping maybe someone can help me out here.  In the last few
> years the main list has gained more members living in Asian, 
> African, Middle Eastern countries.  Now and again, one of these
> members will try to reply to a discussion post and the message
> will show no new text/comments from them at all.
> 
> ...edited...
>
> Sometime last year, or maybe earlier this year, a fellow living
> in Egypt joined and was encountering these problems.  I managed 
> to catch him on YM, and we just could not determine what the 
> problem was.  ...
> 
> And just a day or so ago a new member from India tried to reply
> to a discussion post, but instead of the message being sent to
> the group's posting address (HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com) it
> went to the owner address (HPforGrownups-owner at yahoogroups.com).
> When I tried to read the message, Outlook Express gave me a 
> prompt telling me I'd need to install the Arabic language pack 
> to read the message properly.
> 
> So, is the 'problem' that these list members may not be using
> English text when they post?  We've got many members from India,
> elsewhere in Asia, Africa, various countries in the Middle East
> who have no trouble at all posting, so I'm hoping one of you can
> explain to me what might be the problem for these other folks.
> 
> They're mostly, to the best of my recollection, using Yahoo email
> accounts, so is there some setting or option they need to change
> to fix this?  ...
> 
> Any advice would be *greatly, greatly* appreciated!  Thanks, 
> everyone..
> 
> --Kelley
>

bboyminn:

Well, I don't know if I can help but I can make a few comments.

First, I correspond with people in Korea all the time, and even though
their messages come to me in English, they are in the Gulim font which
includes both English and Korean Characters. Also, this might be a
Unicode Font, but I'm not sure. Unicode is a series of various fonts
that allow non-English foreigners to write in both English and native
fonts. 

So, when an email comes for a non-English alphabet person, you could
try highlighting whatever text you can find, then selecting a very
standard English font like Arial or Times New Roman, and see if
anything appears.

There is also the matter of Character Encoding. Frequently when I am
on sites like the Leaky Cauldron I find characters like ''' and '"'
are changed to some obscure unrecognisable character. Usually, if I
check [View] and [Character Encoding] is has changed from Western to
European. Usually changing back to Western (ISO-8859-1) will fix it.

Also when you get a problem email, you could try setting Character
Encoding to Unicode (UFT-8). 

So, essentially try changing to a standard font or change the
Character Encoding and see if that improves things.

Other possible but less common Character encodings are Western
(Windows-1252) and if desperate, English (USA-ASCII).

It would be best if the person sending the message remembered to write
it in a standard Windows English language font. In most cases, the
common fonts used by Yahoo are - Arial, and Courier New.

Don't know if that helps at all. 

If you want to forward the questionable message to me, I might be able
to analyse it and figure out where the problem is.

Steve/bboyminn