When you use Microsoft Office Outlook to send an HTML e-mail
message to a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 user, the e-mail message appears
garbled, or it contains Asian characters.
This problem occurs when the following conditions are true:
- The charset property that is in the HTML META tag is defined as "charset=UTF-16" or "charset=Unicode."
- The charset property is not specified in the MIME part of the e-mail message, and the e-mail
message body is not multibyte.
The following is an example of an HTML META tag.
------=_NextPart_000_0001_01C889B5.74713040
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
<html>
<head>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-16">
This problem occurs in Exchange 2007 Update Rollup 6 and in Update
Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1.
This problem may occur if one of the following conditions is
true:
- The code of the e-mail system that sent the e-mail message
incorrectly described the HTML part of the message. The code and the byte stream used different values for
the charset property. For more information, click the following article number to
view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
941851Â
(http://kbalertz.com/Feedback.aspx?kbNumber=941851/
)
An HTML e-mail message appears garbled in Outlook when you send the message to an Exchange Server 2007 user
- You applied an XSLT style sheet to an HTML document. The resulting XML document may be mismatched on several levels.
This mismatch may occur because
a tool used
the original encoding type to save the XML
document. The tool may be the method that transformed the data, an API, or another tool.
To resolve this problem, ask the sender of the original
e-mail message to change the code that generates the XML or to specify the
desired encoding. To use UTF-8 or another character set to
correctly define the HTML e-mail message, use one of the
following methods:
- Add an <xsl:element> element to the style sheet to create a top-level element for the
output.
- Add an <xsl:output> element to the style sheet to specify the encoding. For example, use the following element.
<xsl:output method="XML" encoding="UTF-8" />
To work around this problem, follow these steps:
- Create a new remote domain. You can do this in the Exchange
Management Console or in the Exchange Management Shell for the sending
domain.
- Right-click the new remote domain, and then click
Properties.
- Click Format of original message sent as attachment
to journal report, and then change the Character Sets for
non-MIME character set setting to UTF-8.
Note This workaround alters the non-MIME character set encoding for all
e-mail messages that are sent to the remote domain and that are received from
the remote domain. The encoding is set to UTF-8 for all e-mail messages.
Therefore, this workaround may not be appropriate for all situations. Use this
workaround if it is appropriate for your environment.
Microsoft
has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed
in the "Applies to" section.
There are two methods for producing XML documents by using
XSL transformation from MSXML. You can call the
transformNode method of the Document Object Model (DOM) document,
or you can call the
transformNodeToObject method.
Method 1: Use the transformNode method
The
transformNode method always returns a Unicode string (UTF-16). For the English
language, the second byte is 0x00.
If you set the encoding attribute in the
<xsl:output> element to UTF-8, the data is not converted correctly.
If no output method is specified, the default format depends on the kind of output (XML or HTML). If the output is HTML, a META tag that uses "charset=UTF-16" to set the output encoding is inserted into the HTML. For
example,
the following META tag may be used.
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-16">
If the
response.write function is used in a classic ASP page to
write the stream data back to the browser, the UTF-16-based string that is
returned from the
transformNode method
is converted to ISO-8859-1 characters.
This behavior also occurs if the
Scripting.FileSystemObject method is
used to save the output to a file. ISO-8859-1characters are not two bytes long.
Therefore, a mismatch between the specified encoding and the actual encoding of
data can occur, even if you specified UTF-16 or Unicode
encoding. However, if you saved the message to a file that uses a
suitable byte order, the file will use Unicode encoding.
Method 2: Use the transformNodeToObject method
The
transformNodeToObject method preserves the requested encoding. However, if you specify
UTF-16 encoding, and then you save the document to
a file by using a method that uses UTF-8 or ASNI encoding, a mismatch
occurs. To preserve the
encoding that is specified in the style sheet, you can use the
.Save method for the generated MSXML DOMDocument object.
Best practice
We recommend that you make sure that the specified encoding
matches the actual encoding at every level in a document. The following example creates an HTML document that has "charset=UTF-16" defined in the HTML META tag.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method=â€html†encoding=â€UTF-16†/>
<xsl:template match="http://support.microsoft.com/hello-world">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE></TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>
<xsl:value-of select="greeting"/>
</H1>
<xsl:apply-templates select="greeter"/>
</BODY>
</HTML>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="greeter">
<DIV>from <I><xsl:value-of select="."/></I></DIV>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
To correctly define the HTML document as an UTF-8
encoded document, add an
<xsl:output> element to the style sheet,
and then use an XML API that preserves the encoding.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8"/>
<xsl:template match="http://support.microsoft.com/hello-world">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE></TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>
<xsl:value-of select="greeting"/>
</H1>
<xsl:apply-templates select="greeter"/>
</BODY>
</HTML>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="greeter">
<DIV>from <I><xsl:value-of select="."/></I></DIV>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>