Apple Mail: Outlook Compatibility

You would think that email would work seamlessly between an Apple Mail user and a Microsoft Outlook user.  Unfortunately, if you are just using the default settings on your Mac, you are likely to encounter Windows users who will complain that they cannot open your attachment or that you have "chinese" characters in your email text.

When sending rich text with attachments, Apple Mail produces messages with mixed encodings. When the message contains anything beyond basic ascii, like the accented characters used in European languages, it causes Windows Outlook to display these special characters as question marks, or other incorrect symbols.

To avoid this problem, you can send email as plain text instead of rich text.  Alternatively, you can set Mail's default encoding to UTF-8.  When running Mail, go to Message menu, select Text Encoding and select Unicode (utf-8).  It is also a good idea to instruct Apple Mail to send file attachments as "Windows Friendly Attachments".  When running Mail, go to Edit menu, select Attachments, and select "always send windows friendly attachments"

You can now freely email your Windows friends without having them complain about mis-formatted emails, or empty file attachments.

Comments

[Joel Fairbank]

I read a similar question from someone else so I thought I'd try:

Whenever I receive an email from one of our Mac Mail user's that has attachments it comes into my Outlook Inbox as Unicode (RTF-8). Then there are always "?" marks at the beginning and/or end of sentences in the email message. And her HTML signature gets stripped out and added as an attachment file like ATT00244.htm

When she sends an email w/o attachments it comes into my Outlook as US-Ascii and there are no problem with "?" marks.