Why this Gobbledegook ?

[ExSp33db1rd]

Mrs. ExS and I have access to 3 family computers, 1 Dell Desktop, 1 HP Laptop, and 1 iPad Mini.

Today we received an e-mail from a friend, i.e. a known source, replying to one I had sent the previous day.

The Desktop and the iPad received the e-mail in the form shown below, but the Laptop produced a normal e-mail letter.

This happened last week, too, from a different friend.

Wot is going on ?

This is what two out of our three computers produced ....

x*TMoã6½óWÐC.^Õq¾A×6Ø ë$ˆÝEÑÃXYl(R );ê¯ï#ífí¢·V€{4ŸïÍ›eÃñ$ÐÚÇ‚–Û×@ƒëifØJ=¯}”ZD¶ô™m«fÚwÎÇ@s¶¼¯îØ Ó,}v¦Òvè‹nu”JMN¿£íÓs5¢ŸÄëW|ÔÓ#ýèÞ芻ži<9?UK1S_ÓùøŠ.OÏÎFtÇoG5 w+m¶É]\\^ÒùÕXñ¾›µmLQºÂþ©¶Ûm±âÁÕ:`Ž*ì}öoÕÍd¬Ôl¹üô°¼| çO·÷O÷ø1:´¬!Ÿ8F.›V,f/T:[ë
?5›B-¨å!™#kKFÖlÌ@×4»–Š´*o9jgÉyxvƒ×ë&".Œ”æö ©Ž(Šâß&ç÷4„Ƭ‹´e½AN¼2.DZ¡º‘_ÁK%ïüPÐ}ILí¦P§m[!ÐK©;öGÙ%4®7UöÂT#•ºQ$•¨t(QF(6ypä
[…´=þ{òd=a¸¢ ®ÕÒm+•ÆŒ€#„þ$îr@|oí]›ºò†¥-ÔÏöï"h=7U£—wŽð¥ó®Ñ«´kÍ@×F˾u^BÈૃ€#µry|+%"Øktë¥6RÆ<ö.¡«‘&aÐ vy)öËщβ9â[pP²íM;iŠÀ[.Kç+¶¥d,‰»Îè’WF2ß\dx
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[mixture]

The "Gobbledegook" is produced when you open a binary item in text format.

For example, if you open a PDF in a text editor, you'll get your gobbledegook.

Was there an attachment on your friends email ? Because otherwise it would be pretty unusual indeed for a normal email to appear as such....

[ExSp33db1rd]

Mixture, thank you, there was no attachment returned with the e-mail, just text, but it was a 'reply' to one I had sent with a photograph attached by Picasa the day before. This was just a note of thanks and the usual 'company disclaimer' at the bottom, which is normal from this source and never been a problem before.

The previous occasion was an original e-mail, i.e. not a reply to one of mine, and contained no attachment, again a regular correspondent.

Whatever the reason, I don't see why it was possible to open normally on the laptop, but not the desktop or iPad ?

Thanks.

[Capetonian]

Last week I sent an email to a friend. He replied and added to his reply :

"Why did you send that email all in capitals? It's the internet equivalent of SHOUTING."

I hadn't sent it all in capitals and the other recipients received it normally, as sent.

Why would this happen?

[mixture]

Whatever the reason, I don't see why it was possible to open normally on the laptop, but not the desktop or iPad ?

Theoretically I agree, emails generally should/will open consistently on all devices. Even more so given your description of the nature of the emails.

What makes your problem all the more interesting is that its occurring on different computer platforms too along with different email software.

But without seeing the raw source of the mail its a little difficult and would be effectively a needle in a haystack job.

I hadn't sent it all in capitals and the other recipients received it normally, as sent.

Why would this happen?

Has he been receiving other mails like that, or just yours ? Is it consistent for you, or just that one ?

[Capetonian]

As far as I know, a one-off, since he was as surprised about it as I was.

[Superpilot]

EXS,

This looks like some kind of character encoding problem that your laptop (flukeishly) is able to decipher.

What kind of email service are you using? Hotmail, Gmail? If it's company mail, are you allowed to say the domain?

Also, what are the email clients (or is it a web browser in all cases)?

Are any of the senders in China by any chance? Or likely to be using an email client running under a foreign language?

[obgraham]

They're just messing with us, that's all.

And then, at a time of their choosing, they will arrive in hordes, suck away our juices, and move on to another planet.

[ExSp33db1rd]

Superpilot - Our ISP is our local Telecom, State owned until they sold it off a few years ago, and they got themselves mixed up with Yahoo! a few years ago, too. So our Webmail is from Yahoo!, Mrs. ExS tends to use the desktop and only bother with webmail, which arrived as shown, I read my e-mails over the cornflakes on the iPad, with the same result, then went to the laptop and opened that, downloaded the daily crap onto Outlook from Yahoo!, ditched 90% of it then read the subject e-mail without difficulty.

The Desktop uses Internet Explorer, with Win. 7, the laptop Firefox with Win. H'eight and the iPad Safari and whatever OS Apple use. (IOS 7 I think, I haven't upgraded to the latest, IOS 8 ? )

I'd sent it via Outlook, albeit with a Picasa edited photograph, and it came back via our Yahoo! webmail from a department of the local Council, using their own Domain, which is @XXXX.co.nz. The photo was not sent back.

No Chinese, Japanese, Serbo-Croat were aroused during this transaction.

The previous example, to a personal friend, came back from him unreadable via Gmail.

I agree that it looks as if the desktop and the iPad were unable to un-crypt the message, but as all our devices are more or less used "out of the box" i.e. I haven't the knowledge to seriously muck about with them, why are two out of three out of step ? Nothing to do with me, M'Lud.

Whereas I can see that the local Council may well want to make their e-mails unreadable - subsequently claiming that "I had been advised" so what was I bitching about - the previous e-mail came from a friend up the road, who has no such aspirations.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

[Ancient Observer]

Ah, the reference to Alice explains it all. You have Humpty Dumpty e-mail.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

[Superpilot]

XXXX.co.nz

Aaah, a southern hemisphere problem. No matter what I say then, the opposite will no doubt be true!

My guess is there is likely to be some setting within your Yahoo mail account properties that relates to character/font encoding. This has been changed or automatically defaulted to some undesired setting. Outlook being a thick/full fat email client is probably able to decode the characters, i.e. the "problem" remains just Outlook deals with it where as the browser and the iPad can't. Have a look at the account options via a browser.

[ExSp33db1rd]

My IT Man Wot Does, reckons that the laptop that is reading the e-mails correctly, is set up to use SSL ( Secure Socket Layer ?) and that the message is being hacked "somewhere" en route, but the SSL system is blocking the hacking, somewhere, and so letting it through un-hacked, but that the other two computers are not set up to use SSL - which surprises me - and he has suggested that I look at the settings to determine this, but I haven't yet worked out how to do this.

Does this make sense ?

We have just received another Gobbledegook one on the desktop and the iPad, this time from the Hawaiian Airlines website, hardly a small player.

[mixture]

Does this make sense ?

Regrettably not in the slightest.

If you think about it logically, both SSL and Unencrypted logins are talking to the same email server.

Thus, if emails are corrupted on the server, they're going to remain so irrespective of how you talk to the server.

My guess is that it is something to do with the way the email is being sent, hence the reason you (or your "IT man what does") will need to take a proper look into the raw email source code, rather than just blankly staring as what the email client decides to parse and render.

[Avtrician]

Was the picture sent as an attachement, or pasted into the email.

The reply to from your friends computer seems not tohave been able to retain the original content.

[ExSp33db1rd]

Was the picture sent as an attachement, or pasted into the email.

The reply to from your friends computer seems not tohave been able to retain the original content.


In the first instance I received an e-mail from a friend, that was an original, nothing from me initiated it. The second instance was a 'reply to' back to me, my original had sent a picture as an attachment, the picture was not returned in the reply, just a quick note of thanks plus the usual privacy disclaimer as is added to the bottom of many e-mails coming from Companies. The third incident was a commercial sales pitch from Hawaiian Airlines inviting us to spend money buying their tickets - somewhere in the past we have obviously ticked the box to accept such junk, unfortunately. I try to delete these unread, but was slow off the mark this time, and Mrs. ExS. smelled a "Sale" and beat me to it !

[Booglebox]

I'm willing to bet that the gobbledegook you saw was, or should have been, a picture.
Somewhere along the line something is messing with pictures in your emails. The combination of mail clients, mail providers, etc. is way too complex to troubleshoot, so I highly recommend that you just use attachments and not inline pictures, as this should massively reduce the risk of this happening.